Running Hot and Cold
by Suburban Slasher
Summary: Gojyo is always undone by a crying woman. Sequel to Beyond All Limits. Features spoilers, vicious profanity, some sexual language, lots of violence, GojyoxHakkai, implied SanzoxGojyo, SanzoxGoku, and a crack storyline.
1. Circling Overhead

"Running Hot and Cold"

by Princess of Pain

Part I: Circling Overhead

_SPOILERS: This section very clearly takes place during Saiyuki: GUNLOCK, after Hazel has made his first appearance, but before Hazel starts his batshit mucking about. Really, if you don't know who Hazel is, any references to him are just going to go over your head. Also, references back to character pasts, as per usual._

The sun mercilessly beat down on Gojyo and Goku like the fist of an angry devil. The heat baked up from the desert hardpan, just as harsh. It was like being slapped in two different directions at once: your eyes were either blinded from the light, if you looked up, or cooked to soup from the heat if you looked down. The air they breathed seemed to be alive, stabbing bright knives of fire into their lungs. It made his cigarette taste like he was sucking on a burning wood-chip. It was just as fucking hot as it had been in that forest, three months ago, before Gojyo's life had gotten increasingly complicated.

But that was beside the point. The point was, the nice, normal city they'd been in was far at their backs. Hakkai was gone, and Sanzo was still sitting in their hotel room, pretty and peaceful as a lotus blossoming in a pool of dark water. He probably had the AC cranked up to high, the stupid fucker. At their fronts, the youkai were in droves. They cackled and capered, as they usually did, waving their improvised weapons and shouting their empty threats.

In other words, save for their missing teammates, it was like any other day for Goku and Gojyo. As usual--and the hanyo did not think this without a strong spike of bitterness--the saru would run forward and fight the big turd, and Gojyo would sweep up all the little shits. In fact, they would have begun clearing them out already, except for the group of twenty or so children that the youkai had herded into their midst.

Not a one of them was older than ten. They were all still in their uniforms, crying and clinging desperately to one another, huddling in a tight sphere to avoid their captors.

"Sanzo-ikkou!" the biggest and ugliest of the big uglies declared, pointing a threatening finger at the hanyo and the not-quite-youkai. "Turn over the monk and his Scriptures!"

Gojyo raised his hands in a universal sign of surrender. This was not his bag. He was a smooth-talker, a joker and a smoker, but he was not a negotiator. Compared to the stupid monk, he was a universal diplomat, and he was grateful that Sanzo wasn't there; the fake priest would have thrown around his "I refuse"es and "I decline"s until it turned into a bloodbath. Still, he was out of his league. Goku only knew how to really communicate things with his fist, and Gojyo had no experience talking down a bunch of hostage-taking youkai. No one they'd fought had even taken outside hostages in over a goddamn year.

Hakkai, of course, was the one that should be standing here beside him. He should be there, smiling his plasticine grin, managing to stay pale and cool in the bastard heat, politely and artfully talking them into turning over the children, just long enough for Goku and Gojyo to do their jobs and kick some ass. And when it was over, Hakkai would be there, soothing the frightened children with the ease that only a teacher or a parent could have. Goku would try and fight the poor kids (and break a few arms), Sanzo would grunt at them to quit crying and grow up or die, and kids always made Gojyo feel slightly angry and out of place... Yes. Hakkai belonged.

Gojyo glanced over to where Hakkai should be, and there was nothing but empty space. Of course not. The converted youkai was leaving, after all. He'd probably already left, just slipped on his monocle and his boogie shoes and headed right the fuck out of town. In the opposite direction. Back East, with i her. /i 

Before that moment--when his need for his loverfriend, on so many levels, was so potent that it made a hard lump rise up in his throat--he never would have thought that he would be capable of hating Hakkai so brightly, strongly, and sharply as he did now.

"Gojyo?" The monkey. Goku reached up and put a hand on Gojyo's shoulder, which probably felt like hugging onto a mountain.

The hanyo opened his mouth to speak, and realized that he had bitten through his cigarette's filter. The smoldering paper tube lay at his feet. He spat out the rest of it. "It's all right, monkey. Follow my lead."

"If you say so, cockroach," Goku grumbled. Gojyo had to grin.

The redheaded man looked over at the band of youkai, and began to speak.

-----

The day before, things had seemed somewhat brighter for the Sanzo-ikkou.

Jeepu had had no problems traversing the hardpan surrounding this city, so they had gotten into town in plenty of time, before any youkai, sandstorms, or shikigami could interrupt their travels for the day. The fights, in fact, had actually lightened up over the past three months. It was as if whatever capricious soul controlled the Red Prince had seen their plight with Kaiya, and decided that the never-ending wave of attackers could be lightened up for a while. The party sometimes went for as long as a day without hearing the now-familiar battle-cry of "Turn over the sutra!"

Sanzo had even been in a better humor over this time--after all, they were making great time on the road.

Then, the priest had shown up. That weird, fruity Westron, placidly preaching hate and genocide. Not only had Hazel shown up once, but he kept showing up--him and his zombie lunky. A few nights ago, Hakkai had put forth the idea that the priest was deliberately stalking them; Sanzo had turned the color of an old brick, and hissed out all of the reasons why this couldn't be so between his clenched teeth. These reasons mostly consisted of telling Hakkai to shut the fuck up.

Even so, the monk hadn't been in what he'd call a bad mood for most of that day. Sure, the saru was being the saru (loud and annoying), and the kappa was the kappa (perverted and annoying), and Hakkai was Hakkai (subtle and annoying). But these were all pests which Sanzo had come to accept as a scourge visited upon him by that weird he-bitch of the skies. It made their stupidity easier to handle, knowing that his own superior intelligence had doomed him to be cursed by a jealous deity. Supremacy was his bread and butter.

Then, as they'd pulled up to the only hotel in the entire city--as the signs outside proudly declared--Hazel had walked directly past them, grinning and waving one gloved, delicate hand as he and the lunky walked in ahead of them. This was something that really baked Sanzo's brains: they'd left him behind _days_ ago! How did they get there first, for fuck's sake?!

And that, of course, was what made things even more complicated, because Hazel and Gato took one of the remaining four rooms in the hotel. Meaning, that there were only three beds to sleep on in the entire city.

Sanzo, Goku, Gojyo, and Hakkai all stood in a line. Sanzo and Gojyo both ignored the "No Smoking, Please" signs on the walls. Hakuryu, perhaps sensing the tension building up between the four men, uttered a soft "kyu" from his perch on Hakkai's shoulder, then hid his head under his wings. The hanyo and the two strange youkai were both staring at doors 5, 6, and 7--the only unoccupied rooms. Sanzo was not looking at the doors; he was looking at the three keys he held in his hand.

"I'm not staying with any of you bastards," he said, his words as blunt and final as a volley of bullets.

"Fuck off and die," Gojyo snapped.

Sanzo felt a tic develop beneath his eye. He'd liked Gojyo more when he'd had a good reason to gag the fucking kappa. "You can decide who's stuck with who," he said, his voice sounding like it came from an ice sculpture. "I don't give a tin shit what you jokers get up to, as long as I don't have to look at your mugs anymore."

Gojyo snorted, an ugly, scornful noise that Sanzo had come to hate over the time that the redhead had blighted his life. His hand moving faster than the monk would normally give him credit for, Gojyo snatched one of the room-keys out of his hand, and wandered over to the door with the faded blue number 7 painted under its Judas-hole. "You-all figure it out. I want a shower."

"That's 'cause the roach keeps crawling around in the garbage!" Goku said, smirking. "Makes him smell."

"Says Son Goku, the Monkey King of Body Odor," the kappa fired over his shoulder, but he was shutting the door behind him, and not pummeling the monkey with flying fists and stupid insults. That was... weird.

Before Sanzo could consider that any further, Hakkai walked over to room 7. "I think that Goku would like a little space for himself, for once," he said, his voice ringing with its usual cheerful politeness. And the door clicked shut behind him.

The saru snatched up the key to room 6. He burst into his new room, cackling and crowing that he fully intended to eat everything in the hotel's kitchen, once he finished rolling all over his--HIS--bed. The stupid primate had only kept a room to himself on occasion over the course of their journey, and he was happy as all hell not to have to room with Gojyo.

Sanzo barely heard this joy, though. He didn't move towards his own room. He simply stood, staring at the faded door to room 7. The tic under his eye pulsed and twitched like a living thing. A grating, screeching noise filled his skull as he ground his teeth. If someone had tapped him on the shoulder, the stony quality of his tensed muscles might have fooled them into believing he had turned into a statue.

The monk was paralyzed, not with fury, but with a thousand small observations he hadn't realized he'd made, all weaving together into a disturbing tapestry in his mind. Hakkai, almost sounding ashamed, saying that he convinced Gojyo to let him continue living in the hanyo's home. Standing together in the background; fighting together in the fore. Hakkai actually ripping him a new asshole when Gojyo left to hunt Kami-sama, after he'd only been telling the truth about the stupid kappa. Hakkai, standing in the doorway of the tent, saying nothing, then stepping out into the night--and the two of them in the morning, laughing and mellow and too tired to have slept long, if they slept at all (he shuddered). Hakkai staring out the window after Gojyo leaving with that other hanyo, the fake smile on his face. The youkai tormenting them because the idiot fucking kappa was too goddamn proud to apologize; Gojyo doing that stupid flirty hair-flip when he _did_ say he was sorry. And had either of them actually been talking about Gojyo's failure to clean the hotel room when Hakkai was ill? Sanzo was no longer sure.

_God... fucking... damn it._

The monk considered himself a simple man, who currently only wanted one thing out of the whole of reality: that some loving being would cut the images rising up in his head out of his living brain. And knowing hir, se was probably enjoying the holy hell out of this.

Sanzo marked over to the door, his movements a jerky parody of his normally strong and fluid steps, and slammed his fist like a battering-ram against it.

A shifting noise of cloth came from inside. A few murmured voices. Footsteps, then the door creaked open. Hakkai was there, looking at him rather quizzically. The only difference between the Hakkai that had stepped into this room and this one was the sudden lack of a headband (and Sanzo got a strong, unbidden image of Gojyo pulling it off the youkai with his teeth, something that made him want to projectile vomit). "San--"

His voice was imbued with the righteous anger of Moses on the mountaintop. "I don't want to hear anything."

Emerald-green eyes widened, ever so slowly. "Hear... anything?"

"No. Stop talking." Sanzo's fingers itched for his pistol, but damn it, he needed Hakkai to drive Jeepu and sort out the trash. "This is not a conversation we are having. This is me, talking to you, and you listening. And when I am done talking, you will nod and say 'Yes, Sanzo', and this will never have happened."

The converted youkai appeared to be puzzling all of this out. His head lowered slightly. His monocle and youryoku limiters somehow summoned enough light to reflect and glitter, obscuring one eye and downplaying the other. He said nothing.

"I don't want to hear anything." His voice took on the exasperated tones of a teenager who has finally Had It with his parents, something that annoyed him even more about this whole situation. "I don't know what you two plan on doing in there, and I don't _want_ to know what you plan on doing. I don't want to hear it, I don't want to see it, I don't want to smell it. Nothing. Not a word will pass through these walls--and neither will anything else," he added, a bit too quickly. "What I want to hear is beautiful, blissful silence. And so help me, if I hear anything but the sound of **nothing fucking happening**, I will come back here, but I will not knock and I will not talk. I will kick in the door, and I will shoot you both. Many times. And leave you to rot."

Over the course of this lecture, Hakkai actually turned a little pink.

"Now is the part where you say 'Yes, Sanzo'," he snapped. He felt almost ("almost" being the key word) like blushing himself, but he only pinked when he was drunk, and sake-roses were hardly something that could be helped.

His voice lilting the words into a question, Hakkai obediently said, "Yes, Sanzo... ?"

"Excellent. I never saw you here."

He stamped back to his room, his wooden sandals making a noise that sounded like a series of bowling balls being dropped on the hardwood floor. He could feel Hakkai staring after him, and ignored it. That was no longer his concern. What was his concern was taking off the sutra, hiding it under the floorboards, stripping off his robes, and blending into the crowds of the city as a wonderfully anonymous and unknown person. Without having to worry about being recognized as a Sanzo, he would be free to walk into the nearest bar. And fucking drink it.

-----

"What in hell was he going on about?"

Hakkai shut the door, a blush still coloring his pale cheeks. He looked vaguely stoned. "I... I'm really not sure. I think that was Sanzo's way of saying that he doesn't want to hear us having sex."

The hanyo snorted. That was a regular laff riot. Gojyo and sex had not been very well acquainted since this journey had begun--any sex that involved a partner other than his hand, and even _that_ was scarce, with how often he had to sleep in a room with either all of them or with Goku. He was never quite desperate enough to risk a) Sanzo hearing and shooting him, b) Goku hearing and wanting to know what he was doing, or c) Hakkai hearing at all.

What was worse, as far as the hanyo was concerned, was the rather complicated situation beginning to build up between himself and Hakkai. Gojyo was an imaginative boy, and he only had to close his eyes in order to properly summon up exactly how soft the youkai's lips could be, or how damned good he was at using them. Any spare moment over the past month had been spent (very well-spent, in his opinion) on getting Hakkai alone and attempting to suck all of the air out of his body. What was happening between them was not precisely discussed, not the way they'd laid themselves bare four weeks ago, but both of them quietly and actively worked towards stealing those scant seconds with each other.

Which wasn't a bad thing, unless one knew Sha Gojyo at all. It might then occur to one that the redhead's balls were shifting through the spectrum, from a bright blue to solid fucking black.

Solid lack-of-fucking black. Oh, he didn't want to prove every thing about his libido that Goku and Sanzo had ever said correct, but did he _ever_ need to get laid.

"I think Sanzo's a little too focused on everyone else's business," he grumbled, which was all he was willing to give away of his mental monologue. "Somebody needs to bake him a nice Mind Your Own Business Cake. Top it with some delicious Shut The Fuck Up Frosting and everything."

Hakkai laughed, in that irritating way that said, "I'm not really listening to you at all." Or was he just a little too on edge? It was getting hard to tell.

Gojyo kicked back a bit more firmly onto the bed--the only bed in the room, of course, just big enough for two to cram in side-by-side. Given that this was the town's only hotel, they could afford to skinflint, and did they ever--in his brief look-over of the room, he'd noted only the barest essentials. Bed, night-stand, lamp, crappy ink-painting on the wall. The commode didn't have a ring on it, half the floorboards squeaked, and the fan on the ceiling only had two blades that swung drunkenly through the air. Lovely. The smoke from his cigarette billowed up thickly and stuck around the ceiling in a haze--no window to let it out. Even though he'd tossed his jacket aside, he was still sweating in his A-shirt and jeans.

"Take off your shoes if you're going to put your feet on the bed, please," Hakkai said, in that tone of command he got whenever anything not suiting his cleanly sensibilities came up.

Gojyo looked down at his mud-and-sand-caked boots, shrugged, and kicked them off onto the ground. One glare from Hakkai, and he sat up to arrange them neatly side-by-side. Christ, but Hakkai could make the neatest of men feel like a domestic terrorist, and Gojyo was far from neat--

"Could I get you to put out that cigarette?"

The hanyo could feel his thin patience beginning to chomp at the bit. Nobody but nobody told him to put out his smokes. "What did you just say?"

"I asked you," he said, "if you could put out your cigarette." He moved across the hotel room as smoothly as a dream, kicking off his own shoes as he went. His long, refined fingers worked on the clasps of his leaf-green overshirt, pulling them open one by one. There was a smile on his face that Gojyo had only gotten to know over the last month or so--a playful, subtle smile with a sharp and raptorial edge to it. It was, he'd learned, Hakkai's version of what the girls called a come-hither stare.

The redhead stubbed out his coffin-nail in the room's cracked plastic ashtray, even though his cigarette was more than half intact. He could buy more cigarettes; time alone the man he had begun to mentally refer to as his loverfriend (a girly sentiment if there ever was one, and not one he could really help) was a rare bird indeed.

The lamp clicked off.

-----

"I'm looking for this man. Have you seen him?"

The bartender looked over the filmy photo that the woman held out to him. The picture looked like it had been thumbed, folded, pocketed, carried, creased, and handled into oblivion. It made the guy in the picture look almost like he had jaundice. No one he'd ever seen. "Sorry, babe."

He went back to polishing the light oak of the bar, until he noticed as she walked out that her fine shoulders were shaking, her head hanging down. Poor girl was crying. Maybe the guy in the photo was a boyfriend of hers, or something. Although he couldn't imagine a man who would run out on such a pretty lady.

"Miss? Is he a traveler?"

She turned--sure enough, those big eyes were frosted with tears. "Y-yes..." She sounded unsure herself.

"Might wanna try the inn. We only got the one, it's three blocks down and two over. If he's here, he's there."

He'd give a lot to keep her here and make her smile like that on a normal basis. She bowed, thanked him, bounced out of his life. He grumbled to himself as he went on polishing. Gads, nice girls like that were always getting sucked in with deadbeat jerks. He probably had run out on her.

-----

Careful, exploratory kisses--growing bolder in the pitch blackness that acted as a shield. Hakkai curled up on the bed beside him, one of those deadly hands of his pressed back on the hanyo's chest, pinning him down like a target. It went unsaid that Hakkai, though willing, was still somewhat afraid, and kept everything firmly under his control as a result. Fine with Gojyo; he'd been dying to kiss him for the past four days, and if it meant being thrown back onto the bed, so much for the better.

So he kept his arms looped loosely around Hakkai's shapely hips, and he kept his attention on the youkai's equally-shapely lips. This was not hard. Hakkai tasted cold and sweet, like an oasis, and he had this maddening habit of somehow making each kiss that much more involving and sensual. The more Hakkai kissed him, the more the youkai feathered the tip of his tongue over his lips, the farther Gojyo slipped into the convoluted tangle of emotional and sexual yen that had been threatening to drown him for years. Not the sea of blood--it was more like a sea of, what was that word he'd heard Sanzo use once, _sarx_, something like that...

And Hakkai was getting up and turning back on the light, and no, it did NOT look like Gojyo was going to get laid that day, or ever again, hallelujah, amen.

"Where are you _going?_" he said, no longer able to hide the irritation from his voice. He fumbled for his lighter and his stubbed-out cigarette, which he replaced between his lips and re-lit. He'd heard that cancer-sticks cause impotence, and only wished that they worked more quickly. Once, a girlfriend had hissed at him that all men were dogs, and he guessed that was true enough; he only needed to be petted every now and again to be kept under the porch indefinitely, but this was just sad.

"I need to pick some things up before we can comfortably settle down for the night," Hakkai said, the glass quality of his voice at odds with his kiss-colored lips. He picked up his monocle and adjusted it on his nose. "Including some things we'll need."

"Need, for what?" Gojyo said, still grumbling.

"I think you know," the youkai said as he stepped out of the hotel room, casting a rather wicked smile over his shoulder as he shut the door.

Oh. _Oh_. That was... oh. Holy hell. He had to shower. And brush his teeth. And drink a bottle of Listerine. And shave. And--

He could barely stumble to the bathroom fast enough.

-----

He took forever and a day in the shower, as per usual, using up all the hot water in the entire building, singing in his soft, off-key fashion as he soaped and scrubbed. When he opened the bathroom door, he could swear that it had warped slightly from the steam, which drifted forth from the bathroom in a solid brick-shape into the rest of the hotel room. He was dressed in his jeans and nothing else, a towel turbaned around his blood-red hair, which was rather kinky and needed to be--

There was a knock at the door.

Gojyo blinked, his telltale eyes examining the doorframe. Sanzo didn't knock so softly and unassumingly (_Womanish,_ he thought). Hakkai wouldn't knock at all. Who...

He stepped over, and opened the door. It was a woman--voluptuous hips, large in the breasts, nice waist. Her eyes were crystalline with tears. He was at once positive that he had never seen her before, and struck by a weird sense of deja vu.

"You're Sha Gojyo," she said, her voice filled with wonder.

"Uh... guilty," he grunted, trying to figure out how in hell she knew his name.

"I'm looking for Cho Gonou."

Gojyo's heart fell loose of its moorings.

_-end-_

Next section: "Fairy Tales Lie". In which Gojyo and this woman reach something approaching an understanding.

Hang on, everyone. This is a weird ride, and I hope you'll stick around to the end.


	2. Fairy Tales Lie

"Running Hot and Cold"

by Princess of Pain

Part II: Fairy Tales Lie

_SPOILERS: Hakkai's past. In detail._

"I'm looking for Cho Gonou."

Gojyo's heart fell loose of its moorings. Now, there was a name that he'd never wanted to hear again--certainly not in this context. The towel woven around his hair unwrapped itself, falling limply to the floor and puddling around his feet. He didn't move to pick it up. He only stood, blood-colored eyes wide, his symbolic hair matted and curling at the ends. Despite his dark skin, he somehow managed to pale out.

Cho Gonou. Stone the crows.

The hanyo slammed the door in her face.

He reached down, picked up the towel, walked back to the bathroom to hang it up, or Hakkai--_Cho Gonou?_ his brain reminded him--would have a fit when he got back. Didn't matter much. For the first time in a fortnight, Gojyo wasn't walking around half-cocked. His dick was no longer the central focus of his thoughts. He doubted that he'd even be in the mood when Hakkai got back, a concept which, forty-five seconds ago, he would have regarded with the same likelihood of occurring as Sanzo becoming a nun. Two words had killed that off what good.

Cho Gonou.

That light, feminine rapping at the door. "Sha-san?"

He chafed at the noise. He wanted to scream at her to call him Gojyo, but that would involve talking to her.

"Sha-san? Please, I just want to t-talk to him!"

Oh, shits. Her voice had the cracked, warbling quality that only someone with a massive headcold or a crying jag acquired. He pulled on his A-shirt, the dampness from his skin sucking up into it and forming pale, see-through spots. He could ignore her. He was an ass-kicker and a ball-stomper, and he didn't get cocked around by anyone who wasn't Hakkai (gonou), especially not the fairer sex.

"Please, Sha-san, I... I j-j-just..."

The woman on the other side of the door burst into loud, braying sobs. She sounded like her heart was breaking. He stared at the door, the incessant thrum of the crooked and broken ceiling fan running across his nerves, an incomparably grim expression on his face. Most of him, his intellectual half (the part he didn't really think existed), knew that this woman could only be trouble. He knew that there were only a few people, and at least three minor gods, who were aware of who Cho Gonou had once been, and only those gods and Hakkai's teammates knew that Gonou and Hakkai were once the same person. Anyone who knew that little tidbit, and who was actively seeking Hakkai out... they had to be trouble. It had to be a trick, or a manipulation, and he was for once showing good sense in keeping her out of the room.

The far-more-dominating and emotional side of his personality only whispered, "... but she's crying."

And he had never, in his life, been able to resist trying to soothe a crying woman by any means necessary.

No. No, that was foolishness. It was probably what she wanted. He wasn't going to be duped by this woman, who--

_What if she was still standing there when Hakkai got back?_

The idea was a nasty one. Maybe she was someone who'd known Gonou, and if Hakkai came back with her screaming and crying at the door... shit.

His brain chanted that expletive as he jerkily marched over to the door and threw it open. "Get in here."

Hesitantly, she stepped inside. She was mousy and small, creeping back from him. He realized, as he slammed the door once more, that she was doing this because she probably believed that he was going to hit her. The idea made the roiling shit-storm of his brain calm down moderately.

He waved a hand towards the bed. "Siddown."

As she moved and sat, he produced his battered pack of cigarettes, pulled one free, and lit up. Once that was done (and he felt a little better still), he looked her over once more. She was sitting primly on the edge of the bed, her long fingers fooling with a crease in her dove-colored skirt. Really, she looked like most of the women he passed in most of these towns. The only difference was how friggin' short her hair was. He hadn't seen a woman with hair that didn't, at the shortest, tickle her shoulderblades in years, and this girl had her dark brown mop cut into a, whatdoyoucallit, a bob.

She looked up at him shyly. "I... Sha-san--"

"One," he said, raising up a finger. "It's Gojyo. Never been anything but Gojyo."

"If you say so, Gojyo-san."

He started a little. No one had called him that since he'd finally broken Hakkai (gonou) of the habit. "No -san, damn it."

Her eyes lowered at the vulgarity. "I'm very sorry."

"Two. This is not a promise. This is charity. You got five minutes to explain yourself and what you're about, and if you don't do it in that time, I'm going to have you thrown out."

Her eyes caught his. Hers were still shrink-wrapped with tears. "Th... thank yo--"

"Stop being so fucking polite and spit it out. Five minutes. Go."

"He... I... I really don't know where to start."

Gojyo loped across the room. He was going nowhere in particular; he was far too filled with nervous energy at the sight of this woman to stand still for too long. "The beginning would be nice."

"Well... I suppose I should start with my name," she said. Her small smile was hard and bleak, like an endless field of snow. "It's Kanan. I'm Gon--"

Oh, now that was the absolute grand fucking limit. Gojyo did not know if he wanted to be horrified or appalled. He stomped to the door, and threw it open so hard that it rattled on its hinges. "Out. Now."

Maple-green eyes widened. "Wh--what?"

"Out. Now. That's it. I've had it. If you were going to come up with a lie, you should have made it a more convincing one." He decided that he was angry. More: he was nearly consumed by a raging bitch-fury that threatened to overtake even the levels of wrath in which Sanzo normally dwelt. Hell, compared with him right then, Sanzo was a blind and toothless kitten. He literally shook with the restraint it took not to summon his shakujou and use the flat-bladed end to slap her into the stratosphere.

She stood, a nice-looking girl in a dark skirt and white blouse, pale and sadly pretty. A small, chunky silver cross glittered at her throat. A few quick steps, and she maneuvered so that the bed was between she and he. This time, the idea of her fearing him didn't make him feel guilty--it made him feel a wicked sort of gladness. "Please, listen to me--"

"Get out before I kill you." He wouldn't let this happen. Hakkai would not come back into their room and find a facsimile of his dead lover. Hakkai would not have to live through this. Gojyo would see to it.

Her eyes widened further, then narrowed down, her dark-brown eyebrows knitting together. Her lips twisted into an understated scowl. "You... You horrible man! You're not even giving me a chance!" Tears began to spill once more--goddam, was she a leaky faucet--but they were angry tears. "Would it actually hurt anyone if you listened to me?! You don't have to believe me, I wouldn't blame you if you didn't, but please, at least let me talk to you!" Her voice wavered. "I haven't had anyone to talk to in years."

Gojyo rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. He felt feverish to himself. This was wrong, there was something going on here, but he wasn't smart enough to figure out what it was. Kanan was dead. The Sanbutsushin, Sanzo, Goku, Hakkai himself... they all knew it. They'd all confirmed it. He must be hallucinating this whole encounter.

... but the only one who had seen her die was Gonou, and Gonou had not been the most sane of men.

No, he was not doing this. He was not questioning Hakkai's account of things because of a few words from a woman he didn't know. This was crazy.

He waved his hand for her to sit down. When he shut the door, it creaked loudly, and did not sit right in its frame. He didn't want "Kanan" to stay. But he couldn't think of a good enough reason for her to go, that wouldn't involve him physically removing her.

She didn't quite sit down--she practically fell back onto the bed, facing the far wall, her back to him. His more homicidal, youkai side whispered that the center of her back would look much improved if he sunk the moon-blade of the shakujou into it.

"I... you know who I am."

"I know that you're dead."

She tilted her head the slightest bit, dark brown hair shifting with the motion. "... no. I wish I was. More often than not. But."

"How." A command. No question about it.

She spoke.

-----

_I was captured by Hyakugan-mao. That much is true. And I was his... h-his slave. But I wasn't... no. He never kept me in a jail cell. He, he always said that he wanted... "easy access" to his women. So I was locked up, but I was locked up in his bedroom._

_Well. Not quite the bedroom. It was one of the alcoves. He had one for all the women he owned. The tributes that all those youkai tribes came up with. Other youkai, human women... and when a new tribute came in, he'd just kill off whichever one he'd had around the longest. When the room was pitch-black, you wouldn't even know they were there. He said. He said he liked having the illusion of privacy._

_So when the attack happened, we were all there. He was in the middle of getting one of us to serve him, when the guards burst in, screaming about a god who had come to slay them all. He killed them. Finished with her, tied her back up into her alcove, and stamped out, cursing the whole time. We never saw him again. I was glad._

_I only saw him for a few seconds--Gonou. He went into the bedroom to make sure there was no one in there. Only with all of us being gagged and in those alcoves, he never even saw us there. He... he frightened me. He'd never looked so wild before. I tried to scream for him. But we were all gagged._

_We all heard the fight go for hours. It was loud._

_After the silence, a few of the youkai women managed to break out of their bonds, and they freed the rest of us. We ran out of there. I mean ran. We ran for hours. We didn't look at the bodies. Just ran. Until we finally found a town._

_We all split up. Looking for what we'd been taken from. And I, I stayed behind, looking for some sign of him... I knew he was out there, somewhere. Had to be. Then I heard that he was dead--that a man had been executed in a Temple. I cried for days. I thought about killing myself, but I couldn't._

_Yes, because I was pregnant._

_I was hoping it was Gonou's child. I prayed that it was Gonou's child. I wanted nothing more than that. But when he was born... he looked like you. I knew. He was the son of the youkai who'd raped me. But I just, I couldn't hate him for it. Because he was mine. So I named him Gonou, and it would have been fine, except that the youkai all started to slowly go crazy, and the longer the craziness went on, the more _aware_ people became of why Gonou had red hair and eyes._

_Four months ago. He was taken from my backyard. I was doing laundry. I only turned my back for a second. They bashed his head in with a rock and hanged him from a tree. Put a sign on his neck saying that they'd do the same to any youkai who dared to come to the village._

_And that was it. I didn't... have any reason to stay there. It hurt too much. So I started wandering. Just traveling aimlessly. And I started to hear all these stories, about a band of youkai killers who were mostly youkai. I was angry about it, at first. I don't know much about why they're all going mad, but I don't think that it's their faults... that doesn't make sense. But then, I started hearing more detailed rumors. Their names. And what they looked like._

_Cho, now, that's a pretty common name. I've met plenty of Chos in my life. But everything I heard about him... from what he looked like, what he dressed like, mannerisms... I wondered. I'd made it through alive. Maybe he had, too._

_And, well, I didn't have anything else. Just an idea. So I started showing my only picture of him to anyone who'd look, as I moved West... and the more I did, the more people started to say yeah, that's him. Cho Hakkai. I didn't know why he'd change his name. I just knew that it was him. H-had to be._

-----

Silence reigned, like an evil king. The only noise that reverberated through the hotel room after she stopped speaking was the agonizing thrum of the broken fan.

Gojyo had smoked his cigarette to the filter, stubbed it out in the cracked ashtray, then lit another. He was leaning amiably against the far wall, near the shitty ink-painting. And he didn't know what to say. If she was a fake, she was a damn good one, and he wasn't able to think of a single reason why her story could be untrue. Demons had created apparitions before, and they'd do it again, and maybe Hyakugan-mao--hell, maybe Chin Iisou--had conjured up a vision of Kanan committing suicide, to fuck with Gonou's mind in a very personal way.

The story of Kanan dying had a fairy-tale ring to it, a mythical tragedy, that had never ceased to amaze Gojyo when he stopped to consider it. This chick had to have been off her nut, to think she was pregnant so soon, with no proof or anything. And to stab herself in front of her lover, who had just moved heaven and earth to find her again... there was a certain irrationality behind it. "I love you so much that I'm going to scar you for time and all eternity by rendering everything you just did for me completely worthless"...

She sat on the bed, her back still to his, shoulders straight and square.

Cut her hair in mourning. Natural enough. He'd done it, and so had Hakkai. And he could understand the overwhelming urges Hakkai conjured up in the people around him, the ones that made people seek him out and follow him, even if they were only following him follow someone else. He was a magnet, and more often than not, Gojyo felt about as helplessly drawn to him as iron.

"Kanan" looked slightly over her shoulder at him, her hands resting smoothly on the bedsheets. He suddenly wondered if she was beginning to wonder about the fact that the bed was made for two, and that the hotel's manager had apparently told her that this was where Cho Hakkai was staying (the gods only knew the disaster that would have befallen them if she'd decided to try Sanzo's room first). And if she was, therefore, beginning to wonder what her boyfriend had been up to in her absence.

No. He wasn't thinking this. He wasn't buying this. It was too convenient and flawless to NOT be a trap of some kind. Just because he couldn't think up a loophole didn't mean that one wasn't there. And he was not sure if the bitter anger that felt like bile at the back of his throat was because of this, or because of the suddenly-dawning knowledge that if she i was /i Kanan...

Hakkai would never pursue him again.

Was he more consumed with wrath or with envy?

It was an interesting question, and being a good little masochist, Gojyo fully intended on answering it, but before he could, the door opened and Hakkai stepped in.

_-end-_

Next section: "Damming It All". In which Hakkai expresses his opinion on "Kanan", and Goku and Gojyo have a drink.


	3. Damming It All

"Running Hot and Cold"

by Princess of Pain

Part III: Damming It All

Goodness, where were those parents?

Lian shuddered. The sun had sunk behind the horizon, to die a cold and lonely death, washing everything in her town and in the expanse of desert about it in a filmy gray light. The moon wasn't yet up; dusk still tenaciously held onto the world, like a treasured bauble. It was getting cold already. You could feel the temperature dropping.

She drew her thin jacket more firmly around her body--she'd like a nicer coat, but a teacher's salary was never a fat salary. She gave the twenty or so students who still remained a bright smile. Most of them returned it. Good. No sense in them losing hope.

Lian was the town's only teacher, and she was responsible for the education of over sixty children, who ranged in ages from seven to nineteen. Their parents were merchants, out-of-work farmers, politicians--kids from all walks of life, shoved into the one-room schoolhouse and made to learn together. She did not mind the responsibility; she enjoyed the challenge, but if there was something she hated, it was how many of the broke clodhopper's kids were always left behind when school ended.

Classes were over at five, well over two hours ago, and no one had come to walk these children home.

She would be more angry and vocal, except that she knew that there wasn't anyone to really blame. The desert had eaten across their land with shocking suddenness, two years ago. One could have watched the line of hardpan creeping across the landscape, blotting out crops and grasses. Livestock and plants died in droves, and were mummified in the spiking heat. The desert was why the parents of these children were probably in one of the town's many bars, drinking their sorrows away, and getting pissed at a lot of sand and heat was just illogical enough for her to not consider the prospect.

So she sat with them, and waited. The schoolhouse was towards the edge of town, and one could clearly see when anyone from the main drag wandered up--which was why all of her kids were staring eagerly towards the road. As was she. So when the youkai snuck up behind her, neither she nor the students even really heard--that rustling could just be tumbleweeds, anyhow. She did not see them creep upon her, and when one of them reached around and tore open her throat with thick and jagged nails, she scarcely knew what had happened. All she really felt was a sudden pain, and all she saw was a field of red, and all she could hear was the sharp chorus of the children screaming in unison.

And then, she neither felt, nor saw, nor heard--in any way that the living could discern.

-----

Sha Gojyo was a small, fraying pile of jolted nerves and jilted emotion.

When Hakkai had returned, and saw "Kanan"... it'd been weird. He'd looked at her, and all the emotions that had been building up behind that smile drained out, as smartly as blood from a wound. He'd set down his burden--a couple of large, paper bags loaded with food, and one smaller black bag--gestured for her to follow him, and walked out of the room. Gojyo had never seen Hakkai that silent, and he'd never seen Hakkai that dead.

Gonou, though... that was something different.

The longer his loverfriend was gone, the more nervy he got. He sat on the bed, chain-smoking every cigarette he had. He'd puzzled through most of the basic sutra, and flipped over the summaries at the beginning of the Gideon (which was some weird holy text, go figure). He had paced the entirety of the hotel room too many times to count, and he'd obsessively brushed his hair until it dried straight and fell rich and thick around his shoulders, like sunrise-colored silk. Everything he did was an attempt to distract himself from the fact that the longer Hakkai was out there with her, the longer he was not in here with Gojyo, assuring him that this was all some crazy bullshit mix-up.

He didn't know how many times he cursed himself a fool. That had to be it. He was just too stupid to figure out what was wrong about "Kanan", what set him off about her. He couldn't figure out why he'd hated her on sight, and if that meant that he was jealous, or that she wasn't what she seemed. If the second was true, her story was too airtight for him to penetrate it. Hakkai would know, though. He'd been living and sleeping with her, for shit's sake. He'd know her for a fake. And he'd figure all this out, and explain why it was allowed to happen, and then Gojyo could go about his usual specialty of ass-kickery, and then...

The door opened.

Hakkai stepped in, with his quiet, restrained grace. His face was as blank as an empty bottle of liquor. He did not smile; his lovely mouth was a hard, cold line. Looking into his eyes was like staring into the broken windows of a house marked for demolition. Yes, Hakkai was and always had been great at hiding most of his emotions, but their mental kinship usually allowed Gojyo to at least glean _something_ of what the converted youkai was thinking. He had never been so fully shut out of Hakkai before, except for.

When Hakkai was Gonou.

"It's her," he said, his voice light and cheerful, still not betraying any trace of emotion. His eyes curved up into a smile, along with his lips. "I think it best that you spend the night in Goku's quarters. She needs a place to rest, and that's with me."

-----

Goku waddled back up to his room. For once, he felt full. His stomach bulged over the edge of his pants, grumbling happily as it worked overtime to digest the prodigious amount of food he'd stuffed into it. He felt, to put it mildly, quite awesome.

He toddled up to his door, unlocked it, and pulled it open.

His first sign that something was amiss was the smell. It smelled hot and dry and smoky, like a campfire, and he inwardly groaned. There were only two people in the world to whom that scent clung so tenaciously, and one of them was still not in his room--if Sanzo was there, he'd either be rattling his newspapers or snoring.

Without looking into his room to see what horrors the red-haired cockroach had visited upon it, Goku stepped in, snapping: "Damn it, Gojyo, quit stalking me and go back to your own stupid room!"

"This is my room."

Goku heard something wrong in Gojyo's voice. He had no idea what it could be, though, and therefore ignored it. "The hell it is! You're over there! I finally got a room of my own, and you're not gonna screw this up for me, you horny kappa!"

The saru walked over to the bed, where Gojyo was curled up beneath the blankets, smoking one of his stinking cigarettes. His intent was to climb up on the bed, then kick Gojyo out of it and through the wall. And he might have done it, had he not first noticed the expression on Gojyo's face. Something really wasn't right here. The kappa wasn't angry at him for picking a fight, and he didn't seem to care about the looming threat of the skinny monkey knocking him into the heavens. He wasn't even looking at Goku, just at the wall that separated his (and his ALONE) room from the kappa's and Hakkai's. He looked... sad.

"Oi."

The cigarette bobbed the slightest bit, creating an accidental smoke-ring.

"Oi! Gojyo! Are you all right? Did you finally knock your brains loose?"

He tried to wave a hand in front of the kappa's scarred face. Gojyo absently knocked his hand aside. There was no force behind it--no attempt to kick his ass for it. And he still didn't look over at him.

All kinds of loud alarms started to go off inside of Goku's thick skull. This was more than weird. Had it ever taken him this long to get a rise out of Gojyo before? It normally took even less than this--like them sitting silently, side-by-side in Jeepu. What was he _doing_ here, anyhow?

Instead of kicking him, Goku plopped down on the bed beside him. His full stomach was temporarily forgotten. "Gojyo? What's going on?"

The hanyo took a deep drag on his cancer-stick. When he spoke, he released a thick fume of horrid-smelling tobacco death with his words. "Hakkai is heading back East."

Goku's heretical eyes blinked. He then laughed--the loud, grating, excited giggle that always made him sound like he hadn't a care in the world. "Tell me another!"

Gojyo shrugged. "'s true."

"You're full of what makes the grass grow green! Hakkai's not gonna leave us! He's not like you," he said, sticking out his tongue at Gojyo and pulling down one of his eyelids for good measure. The redhead had to be pulling his leg. Hakkai wasn't going to leave! Good God, Hakkai had been traveling with them this entire time, and Hakkai loved all of them so much, and he took care of them so well! The idea was--

But, whenever Gojyo had told him a lie before (like the time that Gojyo had, for about thirty minutes, gotten him to believe that the moon was made out of cheese), he'd always done it with that stupid smile on his face. And he wasn't smiling now. He didn't even seem to care if Goku believed him or not, and with his other bullshit stories, Gojyo had always strenuously insisted on their truth.

"You're serious," he said softly.

Almost too subtly to be noticeable, Gojyo nodded.

"You're really... what did you DO?!"

The hanyo's sharp eyes gave him a death glare. Normally, that would have cheered him up, but it wasn't the usual look that Gojyo turned on him. This one was... dangerous. But he couldn't help but feel a little angry, himself. The last time he'd seen Hakkai, he'd been totally fine, and now all of a sudden he was leaving them? "You idiot kappa, if you--"

Gojyo exploded. His cigarette flew out of his fingers, to curve in a smoking arc through the air and smolder uselessly on the floor. He dropped it because his hand drew back in a fist, and--

The monkey practically had to bend space/time, in order to move out of the way of Gojyo's freight-train fist. The hanyo lost his balance, his entire body following through the blow, and he nearly sprawled out over the sheets. Goku stared down at him, dull amazement seeping into his skull. Gojyo had just tried to slug him. And not any of the play-punches that the hanyo normally threw--that one nearly created a small sonic boom. It would have broken his nose, easy.

His amazement abated his anger. Oddly, the real attack helped Goku to put things into perspective--after all, he spoke the language of battle just as fluently as he spoke that of food. Gojyo wasn't angry at him. Gojyo wasn't even angry. He was hurt. Which meant that he probably hadn't tried to make Hakkai leave, somehow. Which meant that Hakkai had decided to leave on his own. Why, Goku had no clue.

"What happened?" he murmured.

Gojyo stood up. He stamped out his cigarette with his bare feet. A pained wince spread over his features, along with an underlying expression of relief, as if he both hated and enjoyed the burning pain. "I am going to the kitchen. I am going to come back with every case of beer this place has."

"Can I have one?"

"If you carry 'em, why not."

"YES!"

-----

Goku quickly discovered that he liked beer. A lot. It tasted a lot like biting into a piece of bread, only in a drinkable form. That was fine. He wasn't picky.

He took another huge swig. The alcohol wasn't affecting him at all, not yet; this was only his second beer. Gojyo, on the other hand, was pulling the ring-tab off his sixth, and bright red poppies were starting to bloom on his dark, scarred face.

"So is she Kanan?" He'd listened silently to Gojyo's curt telling of what had happened earlier, and this was the one part he didn't get.

"I... No." The cockroach looked down at his beer, then chugged half the can. He burped, something that made Goku cackle again. "I dunno. I don't think so. She doesn't feel right to me." He waved his hand dismissively. "But I guess that Hakkai would know better than me, right? Anyhow, 's nothing that's really wrong... just something... instinctive, I guess."

"Instincts are important," he said, taking another drink. Both their voices were low and near whispers; this was mostly because they could both hear Sanzo's drunken snoring drifting through the walls, and knew that certain death would befall them if the monk caught Gojyo giving Goku beer.

"Not right now they're not."

He shrugged his bony shoulders. "And what are we gonna do about it?"

"Nothing."

"What? I know I didn't hear that right."

"Nothing." Gojyo finished his beer, and absently squashed the can between his hard palms. He tossed it, like an oversized tiddly-wink, on the growing pile of crushed empties. "Nothing we can do. As the fake monk over there would probably point out, Hakkai's life is his own. He can do what he likes with it. Never had to come along on this shit-for-nothing trip, and still doesn't have to if he doesn't wanna." Something bitter zinged through Gojyo's deceptively smooth voice, like the almond flavor of arsenic.

Goku put down his own mostly-empty can. He didn't want anymore; it was sitting like lead on top of the food in his stomach. "What're you giving up for? 's not like you. You normally never give up for anything."

"I'm sick of getting the shit kicked out of me." There was a nasty edge to the words.

"But he's your friend--and if she's not Kanan, she could be dangerous--are you really just gonna leave him with her?"

"Yes."

"I thought you _cared_ about him!"

"I do, goddamn it." Gojyo lit a cigarette. The paper tube trembled slightly in his hands. He touched the tips of his fingers to his forehead, eyebrows drawn together, as if he had a migraine. "I love him a lot. But I am sick to fucking death of him--oh, he's so fucking flighty, he can't decide if he wants me or he just feels sorry for me, he doesn't know if he's afraid of me or attracted to me, he says he wants to love me and then he drops me like a hot rock at the first fucking opportunity, he can't decide if I'm not good enough or too good or some goddamn thing. I don't give a rip about this quest. For all of me, whoever's resurrecting Gyuu-mao could take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I couldn't care less. I'm only here because Hakkai wanted me to be here, or he said he did, and now I'm roped in too hard to quit. But he can quit. He can do whatever the fuck he wants to and there's not a goddamned thing that we can do except for take it. Bend over and take it." He snorted, as though he found his words funny, and popped the top off a seventh beer.

Goku said nothing. After a few long drinks, Gojyo looked over at him, questions in his blood-colored eyes. "What's your problem, you stupid monkey?"

"..." It was a lot of information to try to sort through and digest. Goku, feeling pressured to say SOMETHING, spat out the first thing that flew out of his mouth. "So all those times that Sanzo said you were a long-haired faggot, he was actually telling the truth?"

"I don't know," he said, he voice like shaved ice, "if I want to kill you or him."

"You sound like him, now."

"I do _not_."

"Do too, do too! Next you're gonna be all--"

"Shut up, bakasaru!" they both said in unison.

The hanyo gaped at him for a few long seconds, then burst out laughing. The alcoholic blush in his cheeks was in full bloom; for the first time since Goku had come back to his room and found the cockroach in his bed, Gojyo looked like Gojyo. Carefree. It did Goku good to see him smile and hear him laugh; the other man's rambling monologue had worried him a lot.

"Besides, Sanzo's just pissed off about someone else having fun," Gojyo said, most of the vitriol tension in his voice dissipating. "He hates it when I enjoy my life. Throws around a bunch of meaningless names."

"But if you like Hakkai like that, doesn't that make you a faggot?" He honestly wasn't using the word as an insult; he just didn't know how else to refer to a guy who liked another guy.

"No, Goku, it makes me a connoisseur of beauty."

He shook his head. "I don't get it."

"Ask Sanzo about it sometime. I'm sure he could explain it to you."

Through the thin walls: "SHUT UP OR I'LL KILL YOU, YOU ASS-ZIT!"

"That monk has the strongest insult radar I've ever heard of," Gojyo griped.

Goku crushed his empties, grinning broadly. Things, at least, felt like they were normal--for the moment.

_-end-_

Next section: "The Wrong Side of the Bed". In which Princess of Pain gives a nod to another pairing possibility (though not because she's a fan), and Goku lays a righteous smack-down.


	4. The Wrong Side of the Bed

"Running Hot and Cold"

by Princess of Pain

Part IV: The Wrong Side of the Bed

Sanzo awoke into a world that, thanks to his immediate and crushing hangover, he hated even more than normal. His head felt like a rotten tooth; his stomach, like a slip of paper spun around in the wind. He couldn't feel his feet. His mouth tasted like someone had come into his room in the middle of the night and laid a thick, dirty shag carpet over his tongue.

The unconventional monk groaned, then winced as the sound sliced into his consciousness. Fuck, he could practically hear himself _blink_ as his eyelids fluttered open. He thought about turning on the lamp, so that he could hobble to the bathroom and put a deposit in the porcelain bank. He got a strong mental image of a vampire dissolving in a ray of sunlight, and decided against it.

Slowly, he sat up, swinging his legs off the edge of the bed. He was still fully dressed. There was no one else in the bed with him, and the sutra was still tucked beneath the mattress. His pistol was still beneath his pillow. Good. A few less things to worry about.

Shakily, the false priest stood up, his knees wobbling, both his hands cupping his temples. His head felt like it had too much blood in it. Oh, he was never going on a bender like that again. Not without due cause.

He was halfway to the bathroom when Sanzo remembered the reason why he woke up in the first place. There was someone knocking at the door.

Shuffling like a zombie in a cheap horror movie, the monk eventually made his way to the door. The floorboards creaked and shifted under his bare feet. He didn't bother using the Judas-hole; his eyes were not focusing enough to see through something so tiny. Instead, he pulled it open a few inches.

One of the hotel clerks. Short, mousy guy. Eyes bulgy, freaked out. Okay. "What... what do you _want_?"

"Sanzo-sama!" The guy bobbed excitedly. "You're the Sanzo priest, right?!"

Shit on a brick. Sanzo wished that he wasn't so goddamn irresistible. "What."

"Sanzo-sama, there's a terrible emergency!" He wrung his hands. "A bunch of schoolchildren were kidnapped last night! Their teacher's dead! A band of youkai're taking responsibility! They say they want you and your sutra, and if you don't show up by noon, they're going to start killing hostages!"

Sanzo had no clue that Hakkai had spent a sleepless night staring at his dead lover's back as she slumbered in the bed beside him. He didn't know that Gojyo had gotten abysmally shitfaced, and had fallen asleep underneath Goku's bed, or that Goku had been drinking himself. And he didn't know what any of them would say or think about this particular lovely situation. Further, he didn't give a rat's ass. All he wanted right then was an answer to one single question.

"... what time is it?"

"Um... quarter of six, I think. Now, Sanzo-sama--"

"Listen, you odious little cum-rag, as you have never listened before."

The way-too-nervous man, perhaps stunned by Sanzo's ability to cuss a blue streak, snapped his mouth shut.

"It's not even six in the morning. The sun hasn't even thought about getting up yet. I have one bitch of a hangover. I can barely see straight. I just woke up. I haven't even had my morning shit yet, which, judging from how bad my stomach is cramping, is probably going to be legendary. Now you are going to turn around, walk away, and thank every single god that I am currently too fucking tired to appropriately unleash my holy wrath on your hick ass. You may come back and lodge your stupid requests in an hour, when I am done with my morning coffee and my morning smoke and my morning paper and my morning bowel movement, even though it's still the fucking middle of the goddamn night. And if you come back two seconds sooner than that, I will pop your eyes out and skullfuck you. You are dismissed."

Sanzo grinned as he watched the clerk learn how to fly, and test this new skill down the hotel hallway. It was a truism: that whenever life handed him lemons, he was always careful to cut the lemons into neat slices, and squeeze the juice into someone else's eyes.

-----

After the monk completed his morning routine, he decided it was time to rouse the slaves and get them to work.

He hobbled down the hallway, his movements still hampered by the all-encompassing headache that was turning his cranium into so much jelly. He passed by door 6, only slamming a hard fist against it in his version of "knocking", and bellowed something about idiot monkeys waking up for breakfast.

He reached door 7, and regarded it with a certain degree of suspicion. He had no idea of the debauchery that Hakkai and Gojyo had reveled in the night before--all he cared about was that Hakkai had been a good boy, and not made any damn noise. Now, he faced the rather unsavory prospect of throwing open the door and finding the two of them naked, or engaged in early-morning shenanigans that he really did not want to think about. Fuck it. If he found them that way, he could kill them. It wouldn't be hard. Two well-placed bullets would do it.

Sanzo kicked in the door.

His hangover-addled brain did not, at first, believe what his eyes were telling it. There should have been some scrap or sign of the redheaded kappa in this room--beer cans, empty cartons of those shitty cigarettes he liked, piles of butts in the ashtray, clothing in a pile on the floor, something. No such luck. The only sign that Gojyo had been there at all were his shoes, lined up neatly by the bed, next to Hakkai's, and a set of woman's pumps.

No, wait. Hold up. Either Hakkai was making money in a rather questionable fashion, or those shoes didn't belong in this picture.

Bloodshot, violet-stained eyes cast his glance over the room. The ashtray was empty, but there were a few stubs of cigarette in the wastebasket. Hakkai's clothes--his green overshirt, black undershirt, arm-bracers, pants, socks, layman's sash (motherfucker had more layers than an onion)--were all draped on the night-stand. Curled atop of the clothes was a snoring Hakuryu, who lay next to a monocle and a small, thick cross.

Wait just one fucking second.

Sanzo finally permitted himself to look where his eyes had been avoiding: the bed.

All right, either Gojyo finally got some sense and dyed his hair brown, and suddenly cut it all off (also wise on his part), or Hakkai had taken someone else to bed with him. A... a woman, from the curves beneath the sheets.

Woman. Hakkai had taken a woman to bed. And not Gojyo.

Sanzo cackled, then screamed: "GET THE FUCK UP, YOU LAZY BITCH!"

Hakkai was staring at him, green eyes completely blank. He'd been awake the entire time, of course. The woman beside him shifted, groaned, buried her head beneath the blankets.

"It's a brand-new day, Hakkai," he said, his face twisted in a grimace. "I've got a hell of a hangover, and you've got a mission to complete. So--"

Quiet: "I'm not going."

"I didn't give you an option, did I?"

"You are not my boss, Sanzo, and you are no longer my leader." His voice was alien. "I am not going to continue heading West. I am taking Kanan and Hakuryu, and heading home. I'm sorry that you will be without a vehicle, but you can probably afford a down payment on a car with your holy credit card."

Sanzo blinked. He was not hearing this. Hakkai had been known to be a smartass, and he'd more than once torn him a new asshole if he didn't agree with some decision Sanzo made, but this... this was just plain bizarre. "I," he said, his voice thick with spent liquor and with the screaming he'd just done, "did not give you per--."

_Kanan,_ his migraine-encrusted mind whispered. Then, more sure, more shocked, _Kanan? KANAN?!_

_"Cho Gonou, the murderer"_

_"killed a thousand youkai"_

_"murderer"_

_"we understand it had to do with"_

_"killed most of the people in his village"_

_"something about"_

_"murderer"_

_"kanan"_

The voices of the Sanbutsushin smoked up in his consciousness. He suppressed them. Kanan. No, that wasn't right. Kanan was dead. This was a fact of life, like The Saru is Annoying, The Kappa is a Pervert, and Hakkai is a Bastard. Kanan is Dead. Sanzo knew that any attempt that had ever been made to resurrect a human being was unnatural--the dolls that Hazel claimed were reinvented humans were proof of that. Nervously (though he would never admit such an emotion), he looked her in the eyes.

Innocent, clear green. Confused, wide, frosted with long, pretty lashes. She wasn't a trick of Hazel's, then.

But she was dead.

Genjo Sanzo-houshi, the 31st holder of his sutras (_sutra_), was not a person who felt it necessary to accept the evidence of his eyes. He was just stubborn and angry enough to refuse to acknowledge that black wasn't white, or that the sky was blue, if it served his purposes. He, therefore, declined to believe that this was Kanan. But that wasn't the point--what was, was that Hakkai was under the mistaken impression that he was leaving.

He opened his mouth, which was full of all the reasons why Hakkai wasn't going anywhere, when the converted youkai sat up. His voice and eyes still had that blank emptiness to them, which was really starting to hike up his hackles. He was about as lively and bright as a shikigami. Speaking of those, the only times that Hakkai looked this way were when he was close to becoming Gonou again. Sanzo unwillingly got a vision of clattering mah-jongg tiles.

"Sanzo, did you actually mean it when you said that any one of us could leave at any time, or were you merely exercising your hypocrisy?"

His reasons died.

-----

_"She needs a place to rest, and that's with me."_

Still only semi-conscious, Gojyo groaned. No, he didn't want to go over this again--he'd been picking all that shit over mentally for what felt like aeons, and he wanted to let it go. The side of him that had begged him to sympathize with "Kanan", though, proved to be masochistic. It insisted that he remind himself of just how unworthy he proved to be.

Nothing. He was nothing compared to her.

_"... how? How the hell could it possibly--"_

_"She explained to you."_

_"Yeah, but something's not fucking right here, Hakkai--"_

_"I don't care."_

_"... what?"_

_"I don't care what you think. I know my own heart. It tells me that she is genuine, and that I am heading back East with her."_

_"So. So, that's it then. You just want me to pack up my shit and toddle on out of here."_

_"Yes, that would be best."_

_"God_damn_ it! Are you really serious? Are you actually booting me out?"_

_"We've established that."_

_"What about the quest, man? How the hell are we supposed to get West without you? Haven't we already proved that we'd fall right the fuck apart without you here? We... we need you, Hakkai."_

_"I made a promise to her, first. I owe more to her than I ever could to any of you. That is as it is. I'm sorry for misleading you. Please, understand--"_

_"No. No, fuck your sorry. Fuck that, and fuck you. Get out of my life."_

Jee-crawlin-hova, but his head hurt. How much did he drink last night?

The bed above him creaked, as Goku shifted, snoring loudly and muttering something about breakfast.

"Shut up, saru," he groaned automatically, groping into his pockets for a cigarette.

He dropped his lighter when the door suddenly flew open, and off its hinges. He looked between his feet, which were protruding from the edge of the bed. All he could see from his vantage point was the lower half of a pair of denim-clad legs. The monk. Damn it all.

"Get up! We're leaving!"

Sanzo stomped back to his room--presumably, to pack, and to readjust the icicle that he'd mistaken for a suppository.

Gojyo rolled out from beneath the bed. He needed to be out from under to properly light his cigarette anyhow. From on high, beneath a pile of blankets: "... is it time to eat?"

"No," Gojyo said, slowly pushing himself to his feet. With the cigarette clamped between his lips, he felt more grounded. "It's time to tell Sanzo what's going on."

They found the monk sitting on his bed, reading-glasses perched on his nose, examining the local paper. He glared up at them over its edge. "That didn't take long. I was starting to think I'd have to light a fire under your asses to wake you up."

Gojyo bit back the smart reply he desperately wanted to say. Whether he liked it or not, Sanzo was their fearless leader on this stupid quest, and Sanzo needed to know what had happened. "Look, Sanzo-sama," he said, inflecting the superlative, as always, with sarcasm, "some pretty heavy shit went down last night, and--"

"I know." He snapped his paper to smooth out a wrinkle, and somehow, made the motion both snobbish and dismissive. "We need to get walking. There's some business about a bunch of youkai holding hostages, and I want to be out of here before they start kicking up too much dickens."

"Hostages?!" Goku cried weakly.

"Youkai? They after the Scriptures?"

"Such a bright boy. Of course they are, shithead. What else?"

Again, Gojyo had to withhold well-justified bitchery, although this conversation was starting to make his antennae go kinky. "Then why aren't we fighting them?"

"Because," he said, his voice that of a parent explaining something to a stupid child, "we no longer have the time. In case you missed it, Hakkai's not traveling with us anymore, which means that Hakuryu is gone. We've got no wheels. Believe me, I would dearly love to stop in every single backwater redneck village from here to India and solve all their problems for them, but that is no longer an option. We don't have time to fuck around and fight a bunch of youkai who aren't directly attacking us. We'll be lucky to walk in a day how far Jeepu could have taken us in an hour, and that is one fuck of a cramp on our schedule, and furthermore, I have a raging bitch of a headache, and I'm sick of everyone questioning my goddamn decisions. Don't you have some packing to do?"

"You can't do that." Goku saw the look in Gojyo's eye, and--perhaps recognizing it as the look the hanyo had gotten last night, right before he'd tried to sock the not-quite-youkai--took a few steps towards Sanzo.

The monk's glare might have set his newspaper on fire. "Fuck you. When the Sanbutsushin come down from the Temple and give you divine authority, I'll admit that even though you're an asshole, you can talk about what I can and cannot do. I will leave when I like, and you are not going to keep throwing monkey wrenches into this trip just because your boyfriend left your half-breed ass out on the curb." He stood up, leaving the newspaper on the bed. "Now--"

Gojyo slugged him. Not nearly as hard as the torpedo-punch he'd launched at Goku last night, but hard enough. The monk's skin felt like ice beneath his knuckles. Sanzo was thrown back onto the bed, a purple-red bruise immediately incarnating on his pale face. Fine blonde hair fell into wide, shocked violet eyes. Gojyo had been angry at Sanzo before, and he'd hated him before, but never quite like this--because, even though it felt good to get that hit in, he knew that the only reason why he'd ever, _ever_ get a lick in on Sanzo would be because the monk had never expected for Gojyo to hit him.

Never. To Sanzo, he was a good little dog who could be briskly beaten into obedience with that stupid fan, but not a dog who would ever bite back. Sanzo wasn't the slightest bit afraid of him, or intimidated by him, or impressed with his fighting skills. The monk had ducked quicker punches than his, and the only reason why he'd gotten away with it was because he was never supposed to have tried.

And Sanzo lay before him, spread over the bed, his shock being swiftly overtaken by his own anger. This was what Hakkai was supposed to do--stop these inevitable clashes from happening. And Hakkai couldn't care less, something that made Gojyo--

The monk was pointing his pistol at him. Once again, Gojyo found himself staring down the barrel of that little snub-nosed gun.

"That's it. I've had it. I'm going to kill you this time, you _fucking_ kappa."

"Hey, now--" Goku.

"Shut. Up."

The monk stood up slowly, pushing himself from off the bed with the stiff, deadly grace that accompanied every move he made. He held the gun like a gangster--sideways, his wrist cocked. The muzzle dug into Gojyo's throat, a cold circle of metal against hot, panicked skin, as Sanzo leaned in closer, leering, eyes like bonfires, lips drawn back in something like a smile, close enough to kiss. And what flashed before Gojyo's eyes was not his own life (because he was constantly fighting with every single ghost of his past, it wouldn't make sense for death to imitate life). It was the quiet revelation that one of the reasons that he was so infuriated by Sanzo--one of the reasons why their discontent had flared up so strongly into strong dislike, and occasionally, hatred--was best summed up with his statement of almost four years ago: _"You know, it's a real shame that you're a monk."_

He hated Sanzo because he wanted the same thing from Sanzo that he'd always wanted from Hakkai.

And Sanzo hated him because Sanzo wanted to fuck him.

The barrel dug into his throat a bit deeper. All Gojyo could see was those violet eyes, burning lily. _He picks on Goku because he wants him,_ he thought, his mind reeling into these thoughts in the seconds before the bullet hit the bone, _and he picks on me because he wants me._ If they ever fucked, it would be one hell of an explosion: clawing, biting, grappling for who was fucker and who was fuckee (and he already knew how likely it was that Sanzo would ever be the fuckee), twists, rips, rough and hard, Sanzo's teeth sinking deep into his neck as Sanzo shoved him down into the bed, too sexy to be rape, too nasty to be love. Searing, conquering, a battle between teeth and nails and dirty want.

He wouldn't have believed anyone who'd said that his last thoughts on Earth would be of the false priest, especially thinking of Sanzo--

A loud, resounding THWAP! echoed through the hotel room.

Sanzo and Gojyo both reeled back, the pistol safely withdrawn from the hanyo's vitals for the moment. "Ah, shit!" they both snapped, each lifting a hand to touch to their suddenly sore heads. Gojyo felt overwhelmingly confused; the only person to wield the paper fan was Sanzo, but the monk couldn't have done it.

They both looked to Goku.

The saru had picked up Sanzo's newspaper, folded it into an approximation of the infamous paper fan, and dealt with their fighting in the only way he knew how. He still held it up threateningly, his narrowed, heretical eyes visible above the accordioned paper's title.

Gojyo gaped. He couldn't resist sneaking a look at Sanzo; the monk was equally stunned. A thick smear of newsprint stood out on his pale face.

"Kanzeon in a kayak," he softly swore.

"Did you just--" Sanzo began.

"Shut up!" Goku yelled, cutting his mentor off. "Just... just _shut up!_"

One could practically see Sanzo's hackles raising up. "What did you just say to me."

"I SAID SHUT UP!" The windows rattled from the mighty force of the saru's lungs. Gojyo heard the slight popping sound of Sanzo's jaw going completely slack. Gojyo could sympathize. Goku did not often attempt to usurp the monk's almost-always-unquestioned authority, but then, Sanzo had become increasingly unbearable since Hazel had popped up. It appeared that Goku's skin was not as thick as his skull. The monkey waved his makeshift fan, as if for emphasis, as he continued to rant:

"Holy shit, what the hell is the matter with you two?! You're supposed to be the grownups! You're supposed to be the mature ones! And you're acting like a couple of idiot kids! You guys might not like each other, but there's a lot more important things going on here than that stupid shit!

"Sanzo said that there were hostages, right? There are people in trouble, and they're really real people, not just--not just things! They ain't part of the quest, but they need our help! And we've helped plenty of people before when it wasn't something that we should've done, and the only reason why you don't want to is because you're upset about Hakkai leaving, Sanzo! And Gojyo, just because you're pissed about it too doesn't give you the right to shit all over everyone else and feel sorry for yourself! We can worry about that crap later, because right now, what matters is that there are people in trouble, and we're the only ones who can do something about it!"

The youth stopped, catching his breath. His fake fan fluttered to the creaking hardwood floor. He looked from hanyo to houshi, as if seeking confirmation that his words had sunk in at all.

Slowly, Gojyo felt a grin creep over his face. Goku was a stupid kid most of the time, but he couldn't help but admit that the saru was right. Hakkai had to, at least for the moment, be disregarded. Not that Gojyo was (or ever could) really let him go... but there was something else going on here, that required his attention.

Sanzo sat back down on the bed, his pistol disappearing beneath the pillows. He lit a cigarette. "All right, Goku," he said, his voice surprisingly mild. "What're you going to do?"

"We," the not-quite-youkai started, then looked over to Gojyo. He wanted backup. Of course, his master plan did not extend towards what the hell he intended to do.

Gojyo tapped a cigarette out of his own battered pack, felt his pockets for a lighter, then cursed when Sanzo's Zippo bopped him in the nose. He glared balefully at the monk as he lit up. Not that glaring ever even scratched Sanzo's surface. Tossing it back, he spoke, his words embodied in a cloud of smoke: "Well, if they've got hostages... we need to remove them, don't we?"

"How the hell do you plan on doing that?" Sanzo's voice dripped scorn, as if he already knew that Gojyo did not have a plan.

The redhead grinned at his traveling partners. "Quite easy, you stinking monk. All we have to do is give them the sutra."

_-end-_

Next section: "All Good Things". A great fight. A fine cigarette. A smooth shot of sake. Love. Recent events teach that all of these things are simply too good to last, but Gojyo might learn different by the end of this next chapter.

A summary of this chapter could have, conceivably, included the notation "... and Sanzo proves that he is Spider Jerusalem's bastard son." I realized at some point that when I write Sanzo, I do tend to make him a bit Spider-esque with his vulgarities. The way I see it, though, if Sanzo were allowed to say things like "faggot", "cum-rag", and "fuck me hard" on television or in manga, he would say them. Frequently.


	5. All Good Things

"Running Hot and Cold"

by Princess of Pain

Part V: All Good Things

"Are you done?"

The hanyo responded with a hooked smirk--that smartass, wouldn't-you-like-to-know grin that never failed to set Sazo's teeth on edge. "Yeah. We're heading out now."

Inside, the monk seethed. He knew damn well that Gojyo hadn't come back into his hotel room just to feel the breeze from the only functioning fan in the whole fucking building, or to reassure him that they were going to be just dandy without him. He wanted something--specifically, to know whether the blonde's foray into room number 7 had produced any worthwhile results. Sanzo gave him his unsolicited answer in five short, clipped syllables: "He already left."

He watched the grin fall off of Gojyo's face as neatly as rotten fruit falls from a tree. It nearly made him smile himself. "Already?"

"Yeah. While you two were still jacking around with that bullshit scheme you're cooking, I went to his hotel room. It was already locked up. The clerk at the front desk says he checked out a few hours ago." Sanzo pointed towards the corner of his room, next to the door, where Gojyo still stood. "He left your shit-kickers."

Gojyo looked to where he pointed. His scuffed, lived-in boots were toe over heel in the corner. If it was possible, he looked even more depressed at the sight of them than at Sanzo's words. Without saying anything, he went over and pulled them on over his socked feet.

Sanzo watched, laid out on the bed. His robes were once more enshrining his body, regardless of the heat. He produced his coronet and its matching sash, and fit them onto the crown of his head, where they rested mostly by sheer force of will. His hair shifted and feathered out of place under its heavy gold weight.

When Gojyo was less distracted with his feet, he looked up, raising an eyebrow at Sanzo's holy gear--the monk only ever produced the coronet when he felt he was on official business from the Sanbutsushin. "What's with the holy beanie?"

"I need to pray," he snapped.

_"You?"_ Even if that slack-jawed smirk weren't plastered all over Gojyo's face once more, the jovial shake of his voice made his amusement unmistakable.

"Look, you ass-mite," he grated, "there is some seriously rotten shit going on here. If Kanan is still alive, I deserve to know why the hell they neglected to mention that important little fact to me."

Of course, there was more to it than that. Sanzo was fond of observing that any of them were free to leave at any time, but it was more complicated than that, and he knew it. Things could definitely move on without Gojyo (the only reason why they hadn't left him on his stupid quest against Kami-sama, or to rot with Kaiya, had been Hakkai's... "insistence"). And maybe, they could go on without Goku, if only without the worry of whether or not the diadem would one day snap off for good. But the likelihood of the quest continuing without Hakkai...? It wasn't very high.

Whether Sanzo liked to admit it or not, he was the brains behind everything--Goku and Gojyo were the body--and Hakkai was the soul. How many times had their lives been saved by his chi manipulations? How many fights had he smoothed over between his teammates? How many meals had he cooked, how many pieces of garbage had he picked up and sorted, how many miles had he driven? How many times had he met Sanzo's stubbornness and anger-management problems, Goku's immaturity and infuriating naïveté, and Gojyo's crassness and ignorance with nothing but quiet encouragement, kindness, and an admirable diplomacy? One might as well ask how many bodhisattvas could dance on the head of a pin.

And at least one of those bodhisattvas was going to answer as to why this shit was going down, or there was going to be Hell to pay in Heaven, when he got there.

-----

_I hate you, Hakkai._

"Gojyo?" The saru, clapping a hand on his shoulder. He felt like the weight of the entire world rested there along with Goku's hand. Sanzo really wasn't here, Hakkai was really gone, and the lives of those kids being saved or not was really up to him. Shit. Being under pressure wasn't his favorite state to reside in.

"It's all right, monkey. Follow my lead."

"If you say so, cockroach," Goku grumbled. Gojyo had to grin.

The redheaded man looked over at the band of youkai, and said: "We'd enjoy handing the idiot monk over, but His Eminence has declined to appear for you clowns today!"

The bulkiest, nastiest-looking of the youkai cut his hand through the air, slicing off the myriad protests that were borne into the air from his lackeys at Gojyo's words. "I think you're a liar," he bellowed, sounding like an ox that had learned how to talk. "You guys never go anywhere without your boss."

Gojyo's antennae spiked. "Is that like how your mom never goes anywhere without her pimp?"

The youkai roared with the ball-busting fury that only a matronly-based insult could ellicit, which indicated to Gojyo that, as far as diplomacy went, he was not a shining star. Before any of the youkai could carve into the shivering circle of frightened kids, he tried another tack: "Look, I don't see what we have to quibble over. You've got your hostages. And I've got your sutra."

He reached into his pocket, and pulled out the aforementioned sutra, tied into the scroll formation that Sanzo favored when he wasn't wearing it. He waved it slightly, making it more clear what it was that he held in his hand. His grin widened as he watched the youkai immediately settle down. From Hyper to Zero in 2.8 seconds.

Big Ugly took a few steps back. "... Toss it over, and we'll let the kids go!"

"Hells no! We haven't been kidnapping little kids recently, so we're the only ones here trustworthy enough to dictate any terms."

A long, thoughtful (and that must have been a strain on the stupid bastard) pause. "What are they?"

"You send the kids towards us." The tip of his tongue tasted his lips. Not that it did any good; the heat and the dry sucked all the moisture away in seconds, leaving them feeling more aching and chapped than they were before. "Once they get near us, I'll get monkey-boy to punt the sutra over. We head back to town with the kids, you head back to Kou Gaiji with your precious Scripture."

"Fuck that! How do we know you'll send the sutra over when you say--"

"I feel like a smoke," Gojyo said conversationally. He held the sutra between his lips (tasted awful), produced his lighter, clicked it on, and held it to the end of the Scriptures, as if it were the world's biggest cigarette.

The change was cataclysmic. All of the youkai screamed--not bellowed or anything, fucking _shrieked_ like a woman who's just seen a mouse. Big Ugly's hands flew to his face, his eyes going wide. The kids cowered, giving wary looks at their captors. And Goku, uttering a surprised superlative, took a step towards him, reaching for the sutra.

Slapping Goku's hand away, Gojyo clicked the lighter off. He took the Scriptures out of his mouth. "Have I got your attention yet, fucktards? You send those kids over, or I swear I'll burn this thing. And you might get Goku 'n me in a rush, but you're still gonna have to run back to Kou-chan and explain to him why you let his precious holy book burn up into ashes."

Big Ugly's florid, pockmarked face bleached out to a sunburned Caucasian. He glanced over at his flunkies, who looked as thoroughly bamboozled as he about the crazy hanyo and his intentions with the sutra. He lurched back and called a huddle with a few of his right-hand men.

"Gojyo, do you really think this is going to work?"

"Goku, I assure you, it's a brilliant plan. Won't fail." He looked mournfully at the cigarette he'd accidentally bitten through earlier, now nothing but a chunk of filter and a scorched paper tube. Damn. Now he needed a cigarette, and there was no time to smoke it.

"OK!" Big Ugly finally bellowed back. "But if we see any funny business going on, you guys are dead meat, you got it?"

"Yeah, yeah, our asses are grasses and you're the lawnmower man," Gojyo grumbled. "Oi, kiddos! Head on over here!"

Slowly, unsure, in a frightened drift of school uniforms, dirty knees, and filthy, pale, tear-streaked faces, the children began to move away from their captors. Every single one of them made Gojyo's heart sting. Farmer's kids, the clerk at the front desk had told them. Parents left them at school for hours while they went out drinking. Probably beat them when they got home. It was a tough old world. In particular, because not a one of them didn't remind him of himself (except for the tears; except for once, he had not cried since he was four years old).

He handed the Scripture to Goku, who obediently summoned his nyou-ibo and batted the sutra over to the youkai. They capered, crowed, screamed victory, as Big Ugly picked it up.

When the gaggle of kids got close enough, he flashed them his brightest, most charming smile--in spite of the fact that the scars curving into his face were beginning to throb--and said: "Okay, do you all know what 'run like hell' means?"

Blinking, moving as one from their communal shock and fear, they nodded.

"Good. Do that--" he said, thumbing towards the town "--until you get over there. Don't look back, and don't _come_ back, you understand?"

A few of the kids looked hesitant to leave their saviors, when suddenly, Big Ugly screamed--

**"This isn't the sutra! It's a goddamn newspaper covered with marker!"**

"Do it now!" Gojyo snapped, and thank the gods, the kids complied.

The bullish leader of the youkai band ripped the fake sutra into shreds, screaming in impotent rage as his hostages ran far and away. Gojyo sighed as ribbons of newspaper fluttered to the shimmering hardpan. It had taken Goku and him two full hours to cut up Sanzo's newspaper, tape it into a long string, color it, and wrap it up so that your average, idiot youkai wouldn't be able to tell the difference. That was a lot of work wasted, damn it.

"They figured it out a lot quicker than we thought," Goku said. He sounded disappointed, too. That sutra had been a work of fuckin' _art_.

"'s cool," Gojyo said, his mouth curving into his favorite grin. "Just means that we move up the time-table. Instead of saving the country ass-whoopin' for Sanzo, we'll dish it out now."

_"All right!" _ Goku brandished the nyou-ibo before him, as the stinking cloud of youkai trampled towards them, swinging their primitive weapons and shrieking justice. He blinked when Gojyo's hard, dark hand suddenly closed around the nyou-ibo, holding it back.

"I have a better idea than that," Gojyo said. A slightly crazy grin was on his face, and why not? The kids were saved, and still, nothing made sense. Hakkai was still gone. He was not going to be there when Gojyo returned to the hotel. He was never going to be there again. That constant, cool green presence that had been a huge stabilizer in his life would not be felt one last time. Hakkai hadn't even said goodbye. He'd just left, like nothing meant anything to him except for some dead bitch. Well, fine. Hakkai could have the dead bitch, and if she turned out to be some trick, Hakkai could deal with it on his own. And if she didn't, he hoped that Hakkai was happy with how miserable he'd left his friends (loverfriend).

Without him.

"Any jackass can use a weapon," he said, his smile sharpening. "It takes a real man to kill with your bare hands."

-----

Sanzo watched the battle from the hotel room--the flat emptiness of the desert made it easy to see far out. He watched the kids escape, as somehow, that idiotic plan that Gojyo had come up with actually worked. And he watched as Goku put the nyou-ibo wherever it went when he didn't need it, and saw hanyo and heretic dive into the crowd of youkai bare-handed.

After that, it got a little hard to discern who was doing what to whom, and the false priest only got brief flashes of sudden, stunning clarity in the chaos of the battle. Goku grabbing two youkai warriors and slamming their heads together; both of their skulls impacted, cracked, bled buckets. Gojyo dodging one guy's sword, then punching him in the face. And judging by how the guy fell down, and how his nose looked like a mass of raspberry jam, he hit hard enough to drive most of the youkai's nose up into his brain. Goku's thin limbs flying, tripping a few of them over, getting them to fall on their own swords. Gojyo somehow knocking the leader to the hard, hot sand--Sanzo never could figure out how Gojyo had learned the art of pinning, and even he had to admit that the hanyo was a master--and driving his knuckles into the minotaur's thick throat, punching hard enough to actually crumple the esophagus, and holding the poor fucker down as he drowned in the open air.

The monk stared, serene, at the dark blood and gore that was sucked immediately into the hungry sands, leaving only shadowy stains on its otherwise-pristine ivory. The coronet rested heavily on his head, and he picked it up and tucked it back into the pouch in his sleeve. There had been no answer from the gods, and their implied threat was that he should have known better than to ask. Kanzeon Bosatsu, who was apparently on hir version of the rag, had snapped that if the gods saved no one, Sanzo could hardly expect for them to break that tradition and answer his demands. The only thing more infuriating than dealing with that he-bitch was the knowledge that, no matter how righteously fucking angry he got, it did no good at all. There was still no reason why Kanan should be alive, yet alive she seemed to be, and neither he nor anyone else could come up with a good reason why she couldn't.

Fuck him. What were they going to _do?_

Sanzo sat, staring out the window, meditating on their battle. As always, when he meditated, he did so with the barrel of his pistol resting solidly against his temple.

-----

The three remaining members of the Sanzo-ikkou walked through the desert, their lank bodies shrouded in white cloaks to protect themselves from the sun. It did little good. By the time the sun set and they settled down for the evening, they were all seeing psychedelic vapor-trails from staring at the bright glare of the sun reflecting on the sands. Sanzo's pale face was a flaring pink that, if Gojyo knew anything about sunburns, would develop into a raging crimson by morning.

There was no game to catch, which was fine, because there was no brush to gather and make a fire. They sat around their meager camp, eating what food stores they had brought with them. Gojyo and Sanzo's cigarettes created thick spumes of smokes that were a dull golden-gray in the dying sunset. It smelled hot and arid, with the underlying, biting promise of a bitch-cold night ahead of them.

None of them spoke; there was no Hakkai to bring up polite conversation. Even Gojyo and Goku seemed reluctant to pick their usual fights.

This, Gojyo knew, was the way that his life was simply destined to go. It was as it was. His previous thoughts--the ones about how hanyo really must be destined to misery--bobbed up in his head, like corpses bobbing to the surface of a lake. He didn't ask for very much from the gods, or from karma, or from whatever it was that dictated the turns and dips of the clockwork of the universe. As a child, all he'd wanted was for his mother to love him. Between childhood and adulthood, he'd done everything in his power to keep himself from ever wanting anything so pointless and impossible again. And, as a supposed grownup, he had fallen directly into the same fucking trap.

Hook. Line. Sinker. Net. Knife.

It was the same joke, told from a different mouth. The one thing he wanted was always the one thing he couldn't have. He wasn't sure if that was because he wanted what he didn't possess, or if what he wanted refused to be possessed. It was a taxing mind-bender, meant for wider heads than his.

He had few pleasures on this ball of earth that the gods and their sutras had haphazardly slapped together--smoking, drinking, sleeping, eating, and sex made up his list of things that made his life worth living. And here he sat. The fish jerk flaked tastelessly in his dry mouth; there wasn't a drop of decent liquor to be had. His smoke tasted like dried-out shit. He felt too jacked up to sleep. And Hakkai was still gone, not that Gojyo had been getting any when Hakkai had been here.

Though it would have been easier if he could convince himself that it was all about getting laid.

(the fuck you think)

Gojyo's head snapped up. He'd been nodding, not quite dozing. He nearly dropped his cigarette. His dark eyes, turned a glittering rubric in the sunset they were supposed to resemble, scanned over the horizon. Shit. He could have sworn that he'd heard Hakkai's voice, although he'd never once heard Hakkai say the word "fuck". He was psyching himself out, that was all. Acting all stupid and lovelorn over some bullshit that wasn't supposed to

(how did you)

He shut his eyes, his uncharacteristically long lashes fluttering against his tanned face. This was wandering quickly out of the Land of Psych-Out and into the World of What the Fuck. He'd thought about Hakkai plenty in the past, but he'd never heard the converted youkai's voice rattling around in his brain like a pebble in a gourd. He felt momentarily split, fragmented, as if he were in two places at once. No, that wasn't right, either. He felt--

(do that to them)

_--called._

Gojyo stood up. He had no idea where that voice was coming from. He'd nary an idea of where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. The only thing that he understood was an overwhelming sensation of calling, a pull, the same feeling that iron filings must get when they are put in the presence of a magnet. He felt drawn, helpless, and was glad of it. For the first time since Hakkai had sent him out of that hotel room, he felt like he had an actual purpose.

Somehow, and he had no clue how he knew, Hakkai was in trouble. Hakkai needed him. Nothing else mattered more than those two facts.

Without a word, Sha Gojyo plunged into the desert.

-----

They made poor time that day. Hakkai drove his car extremely slowly over the desert, until she observed that they might walk faster. He smiled, and apologized, then said that he didn't want the dragon/car to overheat.

In the end, they drove until dusk, and they probably didn't get much farther than they might have on foot. She spent most of the time sitting shotgun, staring either into the desert, or--when he warned her about the possibility of her going glareblind--at her own feet. They did not speak; there was nothing to be said. Besides, the oven-hot wind that whipped her in the face constantly was a great deterrent to small talk.

Hakkai parked near a small oasis, then permitted his car to turn back into the dragon form. They drank from the small pool of water that sat like an everyday miracle in the middle of the hardpan, feeding a small copse of tired, old-looking trees. They ate what they had brought with them, Hakkai feeding his dragon with scraps from his own plate. Still, they said nothing.

There was no tent to pitch, but he set up their sleeping bags side-by-side. She wondered as she lay down whether or not he might try to slip into hers in the middle of the night. He hadn't touched her at all the night before, and it wasn't that she blamed him, but she had been looking forward to seeing him again for nearly four years. It was about time.

She curled up in her sleeping-bag, her bobbed hair falling into her face as she rolled onto her side. He was washing up at the small pool--she'd never known a man as determined to keep clean as Cho Hakkai--and he joined her after a few minutes, climbing into his own bag.

She turned over in her sleeping-bag, full lips parted, preparing to speak.

A hand crushed her slender, pale throat in its unyielding grasp.

Her mouth dropped open in a pink O of shock, her bright green eyes widening with sudden pain and terror. Long, delicate hands clawed at the one latched like a garrote around her neck. She might as well have batted at a giant with a fly-swatter. She couldn't scream; her throat was clamped shut against her spine. No air was getting in or coming out.

Hakkai was not smiling anymore. His face was as pale as alabaster, except for two bright spots of hot, red fury riding high on his cheekbones. His eyes were a dangerous ivy green, and it was a wonder that his ocular nerves did not melt from the inferno that appeared to be burning in his mind.

She knew fear.

He hissed, between clenched teeth, his lips drawn back in a bloodless, white snarl: "I have been meaning to ask you _who the **fuck** you think you are."_

_-end-_

Next section: "Saviors and Sinners". In which Hakkai and "Kanan" have a heart to heart, and the author's sanity is reassured (for the moment).


	6. Saviors and Sinners

"Running Hot and Cold"

by Princess of Pain

Part VI: Saviors and Sinners

This was the reason why he'd left them all behind. He knew this, as her throat tightened in his fist. This was the side of himself that he never let anyone see--none of his teammates, Kanan, the nuns and the other children at the orphanage. It was the part of his personality that no living being had borne witness to. About a thousand youkai, and the hundreds of men in his old village, had known it intimately in the last moments of their lives. It was the part of himself that he, as he'd become Hakkai more and more, mentally referred to as Gonou.

Gonou had not been a wrathful man, not outwardly, but he had borne the burden of deeply buried fury since he was a child. One of his earliest memories was of throwing a copy of the nuns' holy book across the library, loudly declaring that the Goddess was a devil for taking his parents from him. He had been beaten for his sacrilege, and had never voiced that particular opinion aloud again. He'd been four.

All the smiles, the coolness, the emotionlessness, had been conceived to hide a seething, vitriolic hatred of nearly everything he laid eyes on. All of those old masks had burned upon the pyre of his selfish, hypocritical vengeance, only to rise up again when the ashes had cooled. An anti-phoenix, a purely unholy bird.

His temper was much less evident now, because as Hakkai, he had actually succeeded where Gonou had failed at deadening most of his emotions. But it was still there. It had very nearly detonated under the extraordinarily effective pressure that Chin Iisou had placed upon it, and it had threatened to explode when Gojyo had failed to keep that last promise. This, though, was simply too much. It would have been impossible to ask for anyone to bear the brunt of this... this _thing's_ complete violation of himself.

Hakkai's life, over the past twenty-four hours, was a mist of negativity. He parroted words he couldn't hear, because he was doing everything within his power to subvert the seething tide of his own personal minus wave that, despite his efforts, rose ever higher. He had long ago shattered into a mess of Hakkai and Gonou, his more altruistic emotions of guilt, sorrow, and mourning swirling in with an ever-increasing, biting rage.

And even if Hakkai could have taught himself to live with this harpy's actions, and with his pain, Gonou would not have it.

Her green eyes were bulging. Her mouth clapped open and shut, capturing nothing. An alarming purple color bled into her pale cheeks, and her hands began to desperately claw at his (_i love your hands gonou_) as they tightened up. His vision was beginning to blur; his once-wounded right eye could hardly see anything besides base motion, and his left felt small and hot. His head felt like it was moments from bursting, like a blister too overloaded with sickness and pus. Her body flailed up against his--the lack of oxygen was becoming dangerous.

His youryoku limiters felt loose on the slim conch of his ear. It would take moments--less than moments--to pull them off, and then, he could deal with her in just the way she deserved to be dealt with--

... no. He did not need to change. Right now, Cho HakkaiGonou was dangerous enough on his own.

"How did you do it?" he fumed, his normally-placid voice compacted and whistling between his locked teeth. His lips were strained into an uncharacteristic sneer. "_Why_ did you do this?!"

Stupid time to ask. She had no air for words. Tears gathered in her eyes--those gorgeous, deep verdant pools, so much like hers. He wanted to dig them out of her skull and fill the gaping sockets with ground glass. He could think of a thousand tortures that he'd love to inflict on her, paced out over months, years, decades, long after she went mad from the agony. He gleefully gave in to those thoughts, to Gonou, and knew that he could never let the others see him like this. None of them would ever be able to look him in the eye again.

Her fingers hooked into claws--of desperation, not youkai-claws. Her nails sank into his face, drawing deep, bloody grooves across his cheeks, flailing for his eyes. His monocle flew off, rendering his right eye blind. His headband was pulled askew. He did not notice--he didn't care. He didn't even care to know how or why she had taken Kanan's form. He was lost in his own personal miasma of every single tear unshed, every righteous question bitten back, every moment that he had spent staring at her back the night before, instead of with Gojyo. Every suppression overloaded. He only wanted to strangle the last breath from her filthy body, spoil her false face, and hang her from the nearest tree for any passing murders of crows to enjoy.

She saw her death carved out in black relief in Hakkai's eyes. If anything, her own eyes widened even more. Her fingers stammered, clawed, then--with a wisdom that surprised him--ensnared his left ear, scrabbling for his limiters.

_Damn._ It was the only thing in the wide world that she could have done to make him stop. He had to dodge, lest he suddenly and unwillfully change, and the dodging required that he loosen his grasp on her throat. Before she had a chance to strike, he backed up. His murderer's hands were raised up before him, silent defense. She wanted to fight to keep her life. Well, he was spoiling for a battle.

The thing wearing Kanan's face rasped and coughed, cautiously touching the violent scarlet bruises being summoned around her neck. She gasped gratefully for air, the strangled flush drifting out of her features. Flecks of blood gathered like pine-berries on her lips. Her green eyes were nearly black, a match for his, hate for hate.

"You," he said conversationally, his lilting tones belying his situation. "Your continued existence in this world requires that you answer me. How did you do that, and why did you do that to them?"

Because his every thought was not focused on himself and his own selfish hates and desires, of course not, no one would ever believe that Hakkai would ever have a thought for himself, he was all about caring about the others, worrying about the others, panicking over the others.

The words were told with Hakkai's lips and Hakkai's pains, but Gonou colored them a lie: what he wanted to know was why this was being done to him.

-----

_"Gojyo, if you don't slow down right fucking now--"_

Sanzo would have finished his detailed description of how Gojyo was going to be ripped loose from this mortal coil. Really, he would have. However, his habit of chain-smoking--combined with a relatively easy life of either riding in Jeepu, standing still, or shooting things--was catching up to him. He stopped mid-jog, resting his hands on his knees as he bent over, gasping for air.

He glanced up, sniper's eyes picking up the hanyo easily as he hauled ass across the hardpan. Gojyo was going faster than anyone who smoked that many shitty cigarettes and drank that much beer had a right to be. In fact, he'd never seen Gojyo hustle that quickly in years, if ever.

The answer was simple, of course. Gojyo was half human, but he was also half youkai. The youkai in him let him access whatever realm the shakujou and the nyou-ibo, not to mention Dokugakuji's possessed sword, resided when their masters did not need them. The youkai in him kept him from coughing in the night when he slept, the way that Sanzo occasionally woke himself up with racking, grating coughing-fits. And it, apparently, permitted him every now and again to fly over the earth, moving so damn fast that there was no chance of a human ever keeping up.

Sanzo's entire being was composed of boiling bile. How dare Gojyo ever even think about besting him? It wasn't that Sanzo thought himself useless, or that he would ever think himself so--but his gifts and talents lay in things that were given to him, like the sutra and the banishing pistol, and not from any innate greatness in him.

It was bad enough that Goku could thrash enemies that Sanzo could only ever dream of defeating (not to mention that the monkey had a bad fucking habit of giving him lip). It was bad enough that Hakkai's chi-manipulation could do what Sanzo should have been able to accomplish, if he'd not been so weak and lost his mentor's other sutra (and Hakkai was about as bad with that talk-back crap as the saru). Now, his senses were telling him that he had to accept the idea that the everfucking redheaded bullshit artist who was little more than whining, crying dead weight--the cigarette-lighter thief--the sarcastic, blubbering whoremonger--the perverted kappa was actually _beating him at something._

He stood, panting, his sunburn aching dully across his cheeks, wishing death on the world. He was just preparing to start off after the idiot hanyo again, when something barreled straight into him. Sanzo yelped, disorientation spinning the world like a gyroscope, as something steel wrapped around his waist and lifted him up. He found himself staring at the moon-soaked ivory of the desert, the sands sliced in his vision by a dark, skinny pair of legs, clad in shredded khaki.

He was. No. Oh hell fucking no shit damn this was not going to fly.

"GOKU, IF YOU DON'T PUT ME DOWN THIS INSTANT--"

The monkey, who had catapulted in less than a second to the top of Sanzo's shit list, gripped onto the wriggling monk harder. Goku was already running faster than Sanzo could ever hope to move, not quite fast enough to outpace Gojyo, but enough to start to catch up. "You should cut down on your smoking, Sanzo!"

The false priest produced his paper fan, and proceeded to assail every part of Goku's body that he could reach--mostly, the back of the monkey's shins. He wanted his gun, but it was conspicuously absent from its holster. "I am going to destroy you. The levels of pain to which you will be subjected are so fucking disgusting that even Gojyo's cooking cannot compare--"

"You just let me know whenever you're done, so I can say 'uh-huh' and pretend like I'm listening," Goku said. He sounded like he was laughing.

Sanzo was going to kill him, when this was all over.

-----

She stared him down. That was a lie, and they both knew it. Gonou didn't care about the others, not right now; he only cared about why his life was falling to miserable shards of glass around him. A grin twisted her mouth--or, rather, an expression that bared her teeth.

"You won't kill me," she said. Her voice was a shredded grind. "Won't and can't--"

Her words were met with a backhand; it felt less like a blow and more like suddenly running into an invisible wall. She keeled back, collapsing onto her knees. Her stupid slate-gray skirt whipped up around her legs, driving sand up its bell and against her skin. Now her face hurt as badly as her throat, and she knew that there was a bloody bruise being born in her cheek, to match the thick finger-marks dug into her neck.

"You are not Kanan," he said, that maniacal good cheer maintaining its presence in his words. "You're not. You never were. Not only can I kill you, but I can do it with a smile."

"Of course," she croaked, falling back further, her ass resting on her heels. She looked helpless, lost, dying. "Whether or not your face shows it, you always smile when you kill, Cho Gonou."

If her words wounded him, he did not show her any blood. "Who do you think you are?"

She could tell him the truth--it wouldn't take much, and that was the entire point of this enterprise. But that would be too simplistic. She wasn't going to give in to him. If any explanations were to be had, it would be under her terms.

He had a few things to explain, as well.

They both moved to strike at the same time. His hands glowed thickly with gathered chi. Her forehead commenced its hot, pulsing throb right over the third eye, the familiar warning-sign, like a small piece of the sun was being borne of her skull. His cannon of light thundered through the air, slivering molecules, splitting grains of sand, and striking her not at all.

By the time his chi-attack reached where she'd once stood, she was already gone, tucked up safely in one of the straggly trees that had bravely taken root beside the small oasis-pool.

She could see him just fine--whipping his head about, chestnut-brown hair fanning across his face, no longer restrained by the verdant headband that now swung around his neck like an ineffective noose. His right eye, normally shielded by the monocle, was noticeably duller than its mate, and reflected far too much moonlight from its green depths to be anything but false. It suited him well. It made him look more false, more insane. She felt a swelling pride at the sight of the deep, painful gouges she'd carved into his cheeks.

"Gonou," she said, her own voice a parody of his psychotic good cheer. His eyes widened--her voice echoed and reflected from a thousand different places, giving him no clear clue as to where she was. "How long did you think you were going to be able to walk about as a free man, before everything finally caught up with you?"

She could taste every hurt he was feeling, and even name their origin, like a wine connoisseur knowing a vintage by its flavor. It was easy to read in his chi--the distorted, aching mass of ill jade, laced with marbled contusions of crimson vines. He had brought her out here because he was fighting with himself. He'd insulted and ridiculed his friends (and that feather-brained redheaded fuck-buddy of his) to keep them from seeing his shame. And opprobrium there was, mating with old and new guilt, with mourning and with a delicious, true anger.

There lay his honesty.

"My name," he lied, "is Hakkai, and you will--"

"I will call you what you are," she called back, her voice fragmenting all around him, like her chi--indistinguishable from the air around it. "You're no different now than you were when I last knew of you! Look at you! You're dying to kill me. You want nothing more than to finish wringing my neck and leave me out here to get mummified in the heat. I'm afraid that dying isn't an option for me, though, not yet."

He seemed to calm down. She could still see those telltale vines writhing across his chi, but they were beginning to weave into a recognizable pattern, and not bleeding across his spirit at random. That was almost disappointing. "If you're going to explain, please do so. I must admit that I am rather curious about how and why you've accomplished this."

Were it just his desire, she would have kept her mouth shut, and killed him discreetly. Sunk his body in the pool, wrung the neck of that stupid dragon of his, get out of this godforsaken desert, and get back to living her own life. Were it just about his question. But Gonou's curiosity wasn't just it; she also meant to tell him exactly what he'd done to her. He had to know why the favor was being returned, or there was no point.

So thinking, she spoke.

-----

_Amaya nearly had a heart attack when she saw her man stumble into the house. Not that she wasn't expecting him, but that she wasn't expecting him to be covered in blood, missing a large portion of his cheek, gouges raked over his gory body._

_"Yasuo!" she shrieked, dropping her knitting, the long needles clacking uselessly to the floor. She was by his side in a moment, touching his bleeding, dark face, shrinking inside with revulsion and anger. "The--the trade didn't go as it was meant to? What happened?"_

_He ignored her, moving to the chair she'd once occupied, sitting down in a heap, like a pile of slag. When he finally spoke, she could see his teeth and tongue working through the hole in his cheek. The trade went fine, he said, Hyakugan-mao would take any woman, human or youkai. But someone else had not liked their exchange._

_He explained, in more detail than she'd ever wanted to know, about a man who had swept through the Dark Crow Clan's lair, killing everyone who stood in his way. This man was possessed of green eyes, longish brown hair, and more vengeance than any human should ever possess. He was a mere human, and should not have been able to kill the hundreds of youkai warriors who had tried to stop his rampage._

_But he had._

_He, Yasuo, had only escaped with his life because he had pretended to be dead. The avenging angel did not ensure that his victims were dead by stabbing them once they were prostrate. And he had only left his dying comrades for one reason: to warn his lover to take their daughter and run._

_Once he was done, Amaya shook her head in denial. "We're not leaving here without you. We'd never make it. We need you--"_

_He snapped at her, his teeth glinting dark red through the hole in his face. He said that he would not permit this devilish man to get away scot-free with the wanton murders of most of his clan. She did not understand--she was a woman, and not a Dark Crow, besides. Women transferred from clan to clan with marriage; her original tribe had been one of the _fu_-like youkai. And so, of course, she could know nothing about clannish duties and requirements and honor._

_Amaya lowered her head, examining the floor, and whispered, "As you wish, Yasuo."_

_He rushed out the door, picking up his flail as he ran. She never saw him again, but she heard all about what happened--about the rape of Hyakugan-mao's castle, and the human-turned-youkai who became a mass murderer to save his dead lover. Were she not consumed with hatred for this Cho Gonou, she would have found him pitiful._

_She followed her man's final edict, taking up Kaiya and fleeing. She kept her ear to the ground, and heard of Gonou's trial, and his subsequent execution. She did not sleep at all that night--she stayed up until the small hours, drinking and breaking everything in their tiny cabin, her daughter a terrified teenager, cowering mutely in the corner. Her mother had never drunk so much before, as it upset her stomach, and she had never been so violent around her child._

_Years passed, and Amaya lived in seclusion. The world was not kind to mothers who had no father readily at hand, or to clanless youkai, or to children who looked more animal than youkai. Kaiya was crossbred between the crow-youkai and the bat-youkai, and her body had not taken well to the mixing. The only good thing the gods had done for her, as far as Amaya could see, was to gift the girl with the ability to talk with her mind, instead of her mouth._

_At three years' end, Amaya traveled to the Temple of the Setting Sun. She always did, around the time of Gonou's death. She would wander the gardens, a bottle of sake in hand, and did not leave until either the bottle was empty (and usually, her stomach would also empty itself), or the lower-class monks who kept the place clean shooed her away. This time, though, she witnessed something interesting--a group of abbots, eagerly chatting over the recent departure of High Priest Genjo Sanzo the 31st, and his ridiculous acolyte._

_She'd listened, taking pulls from her bottle, a nonexistent shadow in the trees. None of them could have seen her if they had tried. They chatted about how filthy the houshi's apprentice was, how crude and thieving--even stealing the peaches meant for Kanzeon Bosatsu's sacrificial altar. She grew bored quickly, and was preparing to leave, when one of them mentioned that the Sanbutsushin (whatever _that_ was) ordered him to take three companions, not one. The monk's former target, Cho Hakkai, was among the three._

_Cho, now, that was a pretty common name. She had met plenty of Chos in her life. So that didn't have to mean anything, except that it meant _everything

_She spoke to people. Learned more about him, as she started to travel from town to town--always to towns where the Sanzo-ikkou had been spotted--always with Kaiya mutely in tow. She learned what he looked like, what he dressed like, mannerisms... and she wondered. He certainly seemed to match the beaten, creased photo that she'd stolen from his old, wrecked home._

_So she followed them, never more than a few days behind, hearing all sorts of fantastic stories about the legendary ass-kickers. Occasionally, she could convince Kaiya to soar ahead, overhear their conversations, and transmit them back to her mother's brain. But no more than that--they were all skilled with their chi, in different ways, and would have sensed a direct invasion._

_Which was what she wanted--what she needed--for the slowly-birthing plan to work._

_It was deceptively simple, and horribly complex at once. She needed to bring him just as much agony as he'd brought her, and she needed to do it, not by attacking him--but by simply being there. She wanted her mere presence to drive him to insane distraction. The only way to do that was to play at being his dead lover--resurrect his most spectacular failure--but she had to do so perfectly. And that was where the complexities wafted in._

_"I can't attack him directly," she slurred to Kaiya one long night, after a strange blue-haired maniac tried and failed to drive Hakkai over his internal precipice. "He knows when someone's fucking with him personally. Bastard can _smell_ it on 'em. And I can't just walk in lookin' like her. I have to act like her. I have to know things she'd know. And he's the only one that would know 'em. But if I stir up his brainpan, and then show up later--he'll know."_

_Silently, Kaiya piped over a strong image: _(Gojyo and Hakkai, sitting at a table, playing cards. Hakkai says something; Gojyo laughs, then gripes when he loses.)

_"Well... maybe. Maybe. Yes."_

_So, finally, she sent Kaiya far ahead, to insinuate herself into a village. To plague them, to get the ikkou's attention. Once that was done, she was to suck out everything that Hakkai had ever told Gojyo about Kanan, and pipe them back to her mother. The first part did not work quite as she'd wanted it to, but the second--the important part--went beautifully. Her daughter had simply held down the walls in Gojyo's mind, kept him from being able to fight back as she invaded, conquered, and pillaged his memory for any sort of information._

_As it turned out, there was a lot._

_She'd lain on the floor of her hotel room, black eyes glassed over, a slick of drool overtaking her chin, as she'd been completely overwhelmed by a massive influx of foreign memory. When it was done--when she'd felt Kaiya's mind fragment between targets, then cry out in fright and agony, then fall silent for the last time--she'd picked herself up. Wiped her face clean. Dropped her whisky flask into the trash bin. And, as she'd walked out of the hotel room, she was smiling wide._

_She moved closer, constantly wearing the special youryoku limiter she'd had made. A typical limiter merely destroyed the youkai aspects of a youkai--the marks, the elongated ears, any animalistic features. This was one that had cost much of her savings, but it actually was capable of sculpting the wearer, to appear to be someone else. In this case, Kanan. Only an aged Kanan--a Kanan who seemed to have taken some hard knocks and endured untold sorrows._

_And, the night before, she caught up._

-----

Hakkai was standing shock-still in the middle of the oasis, between the copse and the pool of water. His body was stiff, like he was overtaken with rigor mortis. His head hung low. He'd pulled off his headband long ago; his hair feathered and drifted in the vague, cool breeze, glinting a frosted mahogany in the moonlight. His hands were fisted together, fingers weaving together, as if he were praying. His nails bit into the pale skin on the backs of his hands. He didn't feel it. He felt numb, as if he'd been dosed with some kind of poison, and in a way, he had.

"I do want to know one thing, though," that voice--fragmented, split up, impossible to trace--echoed. "What did I do wrong? You knew from the start, didn't you?"

"Of course," he said. His voice was low, creaking, the sort of sound one might expect to come from a statue that'd just learned to talk. "You're not my lover. And you're not my sister."

The stupefied silence that radiated from the bitch was almost enough to make Hakkai laugh. He could feel laughter bubbling up, anyhow, an insane gaiety that was the perfect mate to his righteous anguish. No, she wouldn't know that, would she? He'd never told anyone that particular tidbit. He supposed that Sanzo knew--it must have been listed in the avalanche of sins the Sanbutsushin had first explained to the monk. And Gojyo, every now and again, seemed to suspect. But in true Gojyo fashion, he hadn't asked. The closest the hanyo had ever gotten was the softly spoken "This?", coupled with the raised pinky finger, sign-language slang for a girlfriend.

But he hadn't asked. He hadn't known, and so, neither had she.

No, not just his lover. He'd told Gojyo that Kanan was like a sister to him. In that entire month that he'd spent healing in the redhead's home, that had been the most honest thing he'd said. And, of course, it still wasn't entirely true.

"Gonou," she hissed, and her voice no longer echoed, because she was standing directly behind him.

He'd anticipated the move, naturally. It wasn't hard to figure out that, when one turned one's back on an enemy, that enemy would eventually attempt to strike. He spun around, fast as a thought, his hands untangling to cramp up around her neck once more. She screamed, just a bit, then furiously kicked, her skirt belling up, her shirt shifting up her torso, exposing a glinting ring punched into her belly-button.

_Limiter, _he thought, and didn't care. A chi-ball developed in one hand, the other lifting her firmly off the ground by the throat. What she looked like didn't matter. He'd gotten everything he'd wanted from her. He could rest more easily. He could sink this chi-sphere through her black heart, coax Hakuryu into Jeepu, and find the others. Apologize. Beg for forgiveness. Gods, he had to--

Cho Hakkai did not often make mistakes during battles. He knew that Amaya was Kaiya's mother, and he knew that Amaya had freely identified herself as one of the bat-youkai. None of that entered into his mind. All he was focusing on was what he would say to Sanzo to soothe the monk's temper, what he would say to Goku to reassure the frail teenager's belief in trust... what could he say to Gojyo , to make up for driving him away.

He was looking her in the eye, not at her stomach, so he missed her twisting loose the clasp of her navel ring and pulling it out. And he was mentally miles away, so when her legs swung forward, he didn't respond quickly enough. Her clawed toes dug insistently into his belly, right above where the scar lay like a demonic tattoo across his stomach, and tore down.

Sliding, nauseating, majestic torment. Hakkai knew that scars were made of thick tissue, nearly impossible to tear, so when his own were ripped open to bare himself to the world, the first thought that zoomed into his brain like a runaway comet was _Too strong, too strong--_

He let her go, his chi-sphere fizzing and popping into nothingness, draining back into his body to desperately try and seal his wound. That wasn't happening. He'd been split, torn asunder, all the old wound re-enacted, all his sins remembered. His arms clapped around his body, trying to hold himself in, but he could feel his guts slipping loose, like they'd learned how to walk and were determined to vacate their rightful place. Blood gouted over his shirt, his pants, and his sash, turning them black, dark brown and maroon.

He blinked, his eyes rolling, one only detecting black-and-white base movement, the other picking up a grinning Amaya, triumphant, blood cascading over her clawed feet, twig-like youkai-marks breaking over her dark brown skin. The back of her shirt had split to accommodate her burgeoning wings. Her eyes were frightening, sclera-black. The small silver cross hung like a blasphemy around her neck.

Hakkai tried to scream--something, a curse, a cry for help, _something_--and produced a small series of bubbles, each one composed of blood. He was dying, he was sliding away. He fell back, stumbling, falling, his world lost in a haze of failure and torturous agony. As he fell, he thought he heard something like screaming, and an explosion, but that must be hallucination.

The last thing he imagined was, before he could strike the heartless desert hardpan, a pair of thick, strong arms wrapping around him.

_-end-_

Next section: "Blood and Earth". In which all of this horrible business will be resolved, and Gojyo gets a bit of revenge.

The entire plot of this story has, as its linchpin, the following three assumptions:

1. This takes place, in spite of references to the manga, in the anime's world.

2. Hakkai and Kanan were still brother and sister in the anime.

3. Hakkai did not tell anyone that Kanan was his sister.

The difference between anime and manga lies in that one conversation Gojyo and Hakkai have about Kanan. When Hakkai mentions a her, Gojyo says "This?"/"Kore?", and holds up his pinky finger, which is Japanese sign-slang for a girlfriend. In the manga, of course, he says "Yes, but she was also my sister"--in the anime, he says "She was more than just a lover. In many ways, she was like a sister." In other words, for it all to make sense, one must assume that Gonou was lying by omission.


	7. Blood and Earth

"Running Hot and Cold"

by Princess of Pain

Part VII: Blood and Earth

The night was pulverized, like a glass vase that had been dropped onto a hardwood floor. Bits and fragments filled the world. This was how Gojyo perceived everything when things were getting too painful to take in all at once--his vision fractured, only accepting small doses of sight, his world narrowing down to focus like a laser upon whatever was most important. Letting him select what he needed to do most, and somehow, execute it through the chaos.

He'd been running for the better part of an hour, using every hidden store of strength his body contained. His lungs wept as daggers of carbon dioxide stabbed deeply into them. He could feel every beat of his heart surging too-thick blood through his veins, and he could feel every artery and capillary pulse and throb, as if they all intended to explode. His body was drenched with sweat, and his muscles were twitching and trembling, like the prelude to a _grand mal _seizure.

That was pretty fucking horrible, and so was the sight of the Kanan-thing (now more thing than Kanan) near the oasis, her wings swelling and spreading like a virus through the air, frightfully regal. She whipped around, hissed, then screamed. A gunshot went off from behind Gojyo. The bullet droned by like one of Nii's metal bees, close enough to summon up a brief wind that fluttered through his blood-colored hair. He didn't quite see what happened, though, because that was already breaking up into nothingness.

All he could see was Hakkai, ripped open and bleeding.

His heart dropped out.

Gojyo's body groaned, his bones nearly creaking in protest, his muscles burning as if his blood were tainted with a weak acid. He sympathized, but would not allow it to shit out on him now. Ignoring all else--the Kanan-thing, Sanzo, Goku, himself--he stumbled across the grass-ridden sand, nearly falling at Hakkai's side. The others would go after her. Maybe they'd kill her, and maybe they wouldn't. That didn't matter. Neither did anything that Hakkai had said to him, no matter how much it still hurt, because if he died now, there would be no chance for Gojyo to thrash an apology out of him.

He knelt beside Hakkai, picking the converted youkai up, rearranging him to lean against the hanyo's protesting body. Gojyo whipped off his own headband, which he kept for just this kind of situation. He wrung it out. Sweat pattered onto the bone-dry desert sand and was immediately sucked up. Didn't matter whether the bandage was clean; what counted was that it was a fucking bandage. He stuffed everything that was hanging out back in, and wrapped his headband around Hakkai's body, tying it to the side, like the world's grisliest obi.

Fighting back his growing sense of deja vu (_"Oi, you dead?"_), Gojyo floundered into Hakkai's pockets, locating the youkai's own headband, and using it to help tie off the flow of life's-blood. Finally, he undid the layman's sash, and knotted that around Hakkai's vulnerability.

The monk was saying something; he didn't listen. He was up to his elbows in blood. Hakkai's blood stippled and dripped over his jeans, fanned onto his shirt. His face was too pale. He looked like the victim of a vampire. Gojyo was normally about as apt with chi as he was with his own pain--he was an energy blockhead. But he could feel Hakkai's fluttering, murmuring, burning off like a mist, that sweet, high verdant fading to a sick jade. It was dying, and so was he.

Gojyo, after having felt so sure and called and in-place before, felt lost again. He wanted to shake Hakkai awake and scream at him. He wanted to rip open his bandages and leave him there to silently bleed out his strange life onto the ivory sand, feeding the grasses and the trees, turning the blossoms and stems a dull pink. He wanted to hate him, and badly. And at the precise same time, he wanted to cradle Hakkai a bit closer, mutter that things were going to work out fine. Protect him. _Save_ him.

Whether he liked it or not, he had it bad.

"Is he dead yet?"

The monk. Gojyo looked up. Sanzo and Goku's weapons were at the ready. The false priest looked like an ivory statue of an assassin in the moonlight; Goku, like the rag-tag and rather foolish boy he was. The heretic's aurum eyes were casting paranoid looks into the sky, as if he were looking for a bird who'd just shat on his head.

His voice sounded like it had passed through a grinder. "No. He's getting there, though. Give him time."

Sanzo uttered a soft, derisive snort. "If this kills him, he was too weak to bother coming after in the first place."

If Gojyo had not grown so calloused towards the blonde's vitriol, he might have considered inflicting a bit of death upon him.

"Sanzo, I can't find her!" the monkey said, nearly whining. "She was here just a second ago!" His hands twisted eagerly around his nyou-ibo, itching for a chance to use it to crack a certain youkai's skull into shrapnel. Gojyo sympathized.

The monk thumbed the chamber of his revolver open. An empty shell stood out above the others, glittering a cobalt-blue. He tossed it aside and replaced it with its fresh, whole brother, then clacked his pistol shut once more. "Goku. If you ever take my pistol again, when I get it back, I will shoot you until you are nothing but a small spot of blood."

"You'd have shot me if I hadn't ginked it when I grabbed you!" the monkey protested.

"We'll handle the bitch," Sanzo said, his voice taking on the dry authority it always did whenever the monk made what he considered to be an executive decision. "You handle the bastard. Don't you dare let him die. Fucker gets to suffer, for all the extra work he's made us do."

There was something extra to the edge in Sanzo's voice, a hidden serration, pique tucked into his disdain. The hanyo could only guess that Sanzo was miffed over the fact that Hakkai's master plan had not included him, and had been performed without his approval. That made Gojyo's heart glad. "For once, we actually agree on something. His ass is hamburger when he wakes up."

The high priest and his weird disciple both ran off, splitting up and going around the oasis. Not a bad move. She was probably darting around in the trees. That was where her advantage was.

Gojyo looked down at his patient. Hakkai, if anything, was paler still. He looked more spectral than substantial. The hanyo's heart skipped a beat. Fuck, he was really bleeding to death, right here, and there was no deity to offer hir help, either. If he stayed out of it much longer, he would bleed out of the blue and straight into the black. Awake, he could maybe manipulate his chi to help himself out a bit.

The redhead did not often find an occasion that made him think of his elder brother. It was usually only in extremely tough times--or when Jeepu passed a field of red flowers--that Gojyo's thoughts would lightly turn to some of the times spent with Jien. Or Dokugakuji. Or whatever he was calling himself now. Jien, he knew. And Jien had known a hell of a lot of tricks, for being a teenager. He'd told Gojyo that you could kill someone by hitting them hard enough in the nose or in the mid-chest. He'd taught Gojyo all the drinking songs he knew, and would occasionally steal cigarettes for him, although he also taught him how to pick up butts from the street and roll your own, if you were desperate enough. With repulsed glee, he'd once informed his seven-year-old sibling that maggots in a wound could be a good thing--the maggots only ate dead flesh, leaving behind all the healthy tissue--and that leeches' spit really did clean the blood.

And once, when Mom was on a horrible drunk and was running wild, Gojyo had been peacefully sleeping on his cot in his closet. Jien had tried to shake him awake to get him out of the house, but Gojyo would not be moved. And without knowing it, Jien taught him another trick, about how to wake up someone in a hell of a hurry.

Gojyo tilted Hakkai's head, exposing the ear that wasn't adorned with thick silver cuffs. He leaned down, sucked the converted youkai's earlobe between his teeth (and under different circumstances this would have been so fucking hot), and bit down.

Skin and cartilage gave, letting blood into the hanyo's mouth. For just one second, he found that Hakkai's blood was dark, bronze, and salt, before he heard the other man crying out, and let loose.

He sat up, looking down into glazed, anemic green eyes. Hakkai's chi sputtered again--for one horrible moment, it completely died out--then began to gather around his belly, as he instinctively tried to pull himself together. The youkai's breaths were rough and ragged, but he was still breathing.

Gojyo was far more relieved than he ever would admit to feeling.

Hakkai seemed to mentally return to his body, his pain no longer serving as a barrier for his consciousness. His eyes rolled, blinked, then focused upwards, seeing Gojyo for the first time in a day. Monsters lurched and spun in that gaze--guilt ruling as their chief--before the converted youkai pulled his usual trick of cutting off his soul before it reached his eyes, making them as emotional as verdant marbles.

"go-jyo," he said, his voice a strained hiss that didn't sound like Hakkai's smooth, nearly musical tones in the slightest. "you... i'm..."

The hanyo often felt smothered by his own emotions. Whether or not he showed it, he was occasionally so inundated with what he felt that he was nearly paralyzed. He felt that pull in opposite directions, the urge to punch Hakkai's lights out at war with the urge to kiss over his face and mutter something stupid, about how it would all be all right in the end. Wasn't that what you were supposed to say to sick people? It'll be okay, you're not bleeding that badly? Something like that?

_"I'll love you any way you want me to."_

_"She needs a place to rest, and that's with me. I don't care what you think. I owe more to her than I ever could to any of you."_

Relieved or not, he was still pissed. And his temper always did kick its fences and run thither.

Sha Gojyo opened his mouth, and what came out was a furious bellow. "You are a huge pain in my ass, you know that?!"

-----

Where _was_ she?

The five-hundred-year-old youth spun around, the hardpan crumbling beneath his heavy boot-heels. His palms were sweating against the smooth, varnished red of his nyou-ibo. He absently chanted the shifting-words, making it articulate into a number of jointed staves, then return to its singular bo-staff formation, over and over. He felt more than a little stupid, just standing here in the middle of the desert, with no idea of where his target had gone.

It did not occur to Goku to ask himself why Kanan had suddenly become a youkai-thing, nor why Hakkai had done what he had done. He functioned best when he did not think too deeply. How and why were questions that Sanzo would explain the answers to later, when this was over. His friend was badly hurt, and 'Kanan' was responsible. She had to be dealt with. That was as far as his thinking on the subject needed to go.

He tried to scent her out on the faint breeze. He could smell Gojyo's fear, Hakkai's blood, and Sanzo's tobacco-leaf placidness, the calm that always overtook the monk whenever he was honing in on his prey. That steadied the saru somewhat, the frightfulness of the other scents notwithstanding.

No sign of _her_, though, whoever (whatever) she was. When he, still toting Sanzo, had run up to the oasis, he'd only gotten a momentary glimpse of her. Mostly, she seemed to be made of a swelling set of filmy wings. Those gave him the shivers. They reminded him of what's-her-face, the bat-chick they'd fought what felt like forever ago.

Acting on instinct, he'd passed Sanzo's pistol back to its owner, and the monk had gotten one shot off in her direction before she'd disappeared right in front of them.

Now, Goku couldn't find her. He did not use chi to tell where the others were, something that Sanzo had trained himself into, and that Gojyo and Hakkai appeared to manage on instinct. He was a tactile and base creature, in the end. And he couldn't smell her presence, that whiff of sheer hate and blood that had gone up his nose like a small chemical explosion.

Judging by Sanzo's vague cursing, he couldn't find her, either.

How could she be hiding in plain sight? Was she already gone? Where the hell did she go?

-----

Amaya silently landed on a tree-branch towards the edge of the tiny copse. Her taloned toes dug firmly into the tough bark. Her wings folded smoothly against her back. Her eyes, black as twin voids, looked over the clumsy ape that Gonou had nearly murdered, then befriended.

That was what was baking her brains. That fact was what infuriated her, above all else, in those few moments. The sister-fucking shithead was a _murderer_. He had taken her Yasuo's life as if all the years and love they'd shared meant no more than rain pattering down on a corpse: the rain doesn't know the corpse is dead, and the corpse doesn't know it's getting rained on. Meaningless. Empty. Stupid. He'd killed children in their sleep, cut down women and warriors alike, all with a detachedness that should not be attributed to a mass murderer.

And they knew! Every one of his fucking companions knew, and they didn't even care! That sex-fiend friend of his, the one he'd been inches away from laying--he'd known, and he wasn't afraid of the man who had sent over a thousand souls to the afterlife--certainly not afraid enough to keep out of his bed! The monk, the child, the lover... by every bodhisattva, they trusted him, _loved_ him, respected him, defended him--

The tree-branch cracked and splintered between her toes. Her body had grown so tense that she had gripped the branch in half without noticing. Small, dagger-like splinters punched into the soles of her feet. The section of branch between her feet, now supported by nothing, dropped to the hardpan with a sullen thud.

The monkey whipped around. That didn't matter. Amaya only needed a second to unfurl her wingspan, drop the chunks of tree-branch, and dive towards him. His dark-gold eyes widened, and he held up his stupid stick to defend himself. That was pointless.

He was prey. That was fine as kine, as the farmers used to say, before they'd driven her and her girl out of their fine society.

Amaya shrieked.

-----

He was circling aimlessly. He was worried, but he would not let the worry consume him. The Master was sick. He knew that, and the knowing scared him badly. But there wasn't anything for him to do. He gave The Master comfort when he needed it. He gave The Master and his friends a way to travel to where they needed to go. He could not heal, though, and he could not fight. What The Master needed was to be healed and to be protected, and he could do neither.

So he circled, the soft wind catching beneath his kid-leather wings, letting the repetition and the familiarity soothe him. The Red-Haired Man was protecting The Master. The Blonde Man and the Boy were both helping, too. They had taken care of The Master in the past, and he knew that they would do it now. So he did not need to panic.

But panic he did, when he saw the horrible Thing that had so badly hurt The Master, soaring through the air towards the Boy. She was making a ghastly noise. He knew that she was going to hurt the Boy, the same way she hurt The Master. Then, he was no longer afraid. He was angry.

What could he do, to help the Boy protect The Master? He was frail; his breath was no more harmful than a sparkler, and his talons and fangs were no more deadly than sewing-needles. They might serve, though, if he needed them badly enough.

Uttering a thoroughly unintimidating "KYUU!", the miniature dragon folded his wings to his back. His body dropped like a secret from unfaithful lips, an ivory comet in the night. He landed nimbly on the crown of the Thing's skull, and latched on like a parasite, tangling himself into her thick red hair.

-----

"Am I seeing that?" Goku muttered, his blasphemous eyes widening in surprise. He closed them, rubbed them, and opened them again. Nope. It still looked like Hakuryu had dived out of nowhere and tangled himself effectively into the bitch's hair, the way that bats were supposed to and didn't. She'd stopped mid-flight, her wings creating a small hurricane as they attempted to keep her afloat. Her hands were sweeping desperately at the tiny dragon, who seemed quite content with its new nest.

"What the hell is that--?" Sanzo cried out. The monk leaned out from behind one of the tiny copse's trees. Both his eyebrows were raised, and his head was tilted slightly to the side. He looked like a dog who has just heard a brand-new noise.

Goku pointed. "I think Hakuryu saved the day."

"Things have come to a pretty pass when I need that goddamn flying rat to save my bacon," Sanzo griped, then aimed and fired. Unfortunately, the monk still wasn't the best shot, especially at a flying target. Goku hadn't realized how often Sanzo missed until he'd seen Gato's dead-bang aim. The youkai, sweeping low to dodge his volley of bullets, practically ripped Hakuryu out of her hair, a few long locks coming out with the dragon. If she noticed, or felt the blood that began to pour down over her dark face, she didn't indicate it.

Instead, she fucking disappeared AGAIN.

"Damn it!" Goku stomped his foot in frustration; the hardpan cracked and poofed up into a small crater from the force of it. "How the hell does she keep doing that?! Is she teleporting, Sanzo?"

"She's probably flying too fast for us to see her," he said. The monk looked equally pissed off at his inability to murder the Kanan-clone. "Wait till I get my hands on that filthy cunt-rag--"

Their charming conversation was interrupted by screams, coming from the other side of the oasis, where Gojyo and Hakkai were still hiding out.

-----

"I would _kill_ you if I thought I could get away with it!" Gojyo ranted. "Hell, even if I couldn't, I'd do it if I thought for one second it'd be a fair fight!"

He glanced down, crimson edging against verdant. Inwardly, he flinched. Hakkai's eyes were still empty. His lips were beaded with minute drops of blood. He looked naked without the monocle making his artificial eye less obvious to the world. The converted youkai was never vulnerable, per se, and he was still closed off to inspection--but there was an empty need there, a mute plea for survival. He felt a little ashamed, even though he knew that he was in the right.

He always sucked at bullying.

He produced and lit a cigarette, the intimately-familiar feel of smoke pillaging his lungs giving him ground. Hakkai's head and shoulders were a limp weight in his lap; if only the situation had been slightly different, they might have felt pleasant. He felt his friend shift, heard him groan in quiet agony. Then, surprisingly, he heard him speak. "why did you--"

"Shut up," he snapped. He didn't look down at Hakkai's face. Whenever he was feeling particularly swept up in whatever weird emotions that Hakkai could bring out of him, he usually found something more interesting to look at--in this case, the millions of stars that adorned the blackness of the sky. "Don't think about talking. Think about healing."

Hakkai ignored him. Stubborn bastard. "why did you." He paused, as though the monosyllabic words exerted great effort for him to speak. "come af-ter me."

Gojyo looked down, felt uncomfortable under the intense scrutiny that only Hakkai could provide, looked back up at the sky again. The cigarette levitated casually against his lips, like a kiss. "You needed me. That was all that counted."

Hakkai might have tried to speak again, but the hanyo was infinitely distracted, by the sudden, poison presence of that bitch soaring towards them.

He stood up, awkwardly dumping the wounded youkai to the blood-stippled sands--not something he could worry about, his body was already kicking into overtime at the sensing of an attack. His shakujou manifested in his grip. She swept towards them, blotting out the stars, her hair a dark parody of his own crimson mop, her eyes obsessively black. For one second, he believed that he was being attacked by Kaiya again, and his mind cramped, trying to protect itself from the assault that she'd put it under before.

At a distance, he could hear Goku and Sanzo bellowing in anger and confusion, and he understood. She knew she couldn't stand up to the combined bitchery of the monk and the monkey. And she thought she could knock him out of the way just long enough to rip Hakkai apart, did she?

She had another think coming.

The shakujou's large blade swung into the night like an escaping moon, its tethering chain looping and grinding endlessly behind it. The youkai spun midair. The blade flew uselessly beside her, and shot off towards the sky. She soared lower, barreling through the air like the world's biggest cannonball.

Then stopped when the blade, on its backswing, noosed firmly around her legs.

Now, she had a reason to scream. She had apparently forgotten that Gojyo's shakujou had an annoying tendency to fly pretty much wherever he wanted it to go, including many directions that defied the laws of inertia. The chain whipped around her legs, flaying her dark skin raw and pulling the skirt to so many ribbons. It crept up her body like a lascivious gaze. Finally, the moon-blade hooked into the chain, locking itself firmly, and giving her a satisfying thwack in the face for good measure. The instant that she was fully trussed, she snapped to. Her wings flapped and worked desperately, like a bellows, but she was not able to break Gojyo's grip on his infinitely-useful weapon.

His adrenal gland working triple-time, the hanyo gave the chain a hard yank. He dragged her out of the air as a fisherman drags his catch from a lake. He forced her to the ground; her struggling and protesting wings might as well not have existed.

Gojyo stood over her. He felt an unholy urge to beat the living hell out of her, instead of just killing her off. He could find out how her fingers would sound when he stamped on them and broke them. He could tear her apart, slowly, and enjoy every goddamn second of it. He wasn't a hero. He didn't need to be virtuous or merciful.

And how many villains had they fought who, in their moment of gloating glory, had been defeated at the last minute? Had something like that not happened to Hakkai?

"God fucking damn it," he swore. He was getting sick of all this moralistic shit. He flipped the bo-staff of his shakujou around. The blade at its other end was static, short and thick, like a tiny scimitar. It looked like it was their chiefly for balance, and it usually was, but it was sharp enough to do its business. And he wasn't about to untie her and give her a shot at escaping.

The blunter blade whistled through the air, and found its home resting deep in the youkai woman's heart.

She cried out--not screamed, but moaned. Her sclera eyes glistered, like black diamonds, and he realized after a moment that this was from tears. Her mouth champed open and shut, silently begging for mercy, and for the life that was beginning to slip away. Blackish blood that did not reflect any of the copious moonlight welled forth, spraying up over the small jangles at the top of the short blade and the base of the bo-staff. Her wings gave a few more great, weeping swoops, then twitched and lay still against the alabaster sands. Her body strained against its chains, unintentionally pressing the blade deeper into her heart. Lay still. Sighed. A bright flash of light cut momentarily through the milky night. And she crumbled into nothingness, as if she had never existed in the first place.

Gojyo had no idea of the woman's reasons, nor of her madness; he had not been privy to her story. He could only assume that she was crying over not getting a chance to kill Hakkai. He spat on her dispersing ashes.

Hakkai. Wait. Was he--

The hanyo checked over the converted youkai's pulse. Weak, but growing stronger. Hakkai had slipped unconscious while Gojyo had been batting cleanup. That, or he was just sleeping. Recharging his chi batteries. Gojyo preferred that idea.

He gave Hakkai's blood-caked bandages a good poke. He didn't feel much give beneath the stiffening layers of cloth, which meant that the youkai had probably succeeded in at least scabbing over his wounds. If they were careful, he'd heal.

"Oi, _boki_ kappa!"

Ah, the dulcet tones of his dearest friend, the holiest of holies, Genjo Sanzo. He stood up, his knees and spine popping in protest, and looked over his approaching companions. Goku was reverently toting Hakuryu, who was wrapped in what looked like a red silken blanket. Sanzo was depositing his pistol into the pouch in his sleeve.

"You slack-jawed, douche-guzzling morons!" he snapped at them, his shakujou disappearing into the ether. "While you were out jacking off in the oasis, I was saving the goddamn universe _again_! What the hell is your--"

Gojyo found himself suddenly glad of his half-youkai speed. Dodging a flailing nyou-ibo and a rain of banishing bullets was not a task for the slow.

_-end-_

Next section: "Yuanfen". In which Sanzo lectures Hakkai on Buddhism, and Gojyo's revenge is completed.


	8. Yuanfen

"Running Hot and Cold"

by Princess of Pain

Part VIII: Yuanfen

_It takes hundreds of incarnations for two people to share the same boat, and thousands to share the same pillow. -- Mandarin proverb about_ yuanfen

Genjo Sanzo, the almighty, the great and blessed (and fantastically superior to all he surveyed), shrieked. His voice hit an octave which was normally reserved for dog whistles. His violet eyes bugged out with alarm, the pupils narrowing down to near-nothingness as his body attempted to block out his oncoming death. His fingernails sank into Jeepu's upholstery, making the car kyuu in discomfort.

The false priest had been terrified before, though he'd never caved in to such a paltry emotion. Not on the many, many occasions when he'd found himself surrounded by googles of youkai--they were never any sort of issue, being, as a rule, possessed of awe-inspiring and crippling stupidity. No, when Sanzo felt fear, it was always in response to something far more... _personal_ than a mere fight. There had been the times that Kanzeon Bosatsu had appeared to him and the rest of the ikkou, for instance. The time where he'd been sucked into the gigantic suit of armor, and when he'd first realized who Rikudo had been before the living talisman had died. And that once, in the desert, when he'd awakened through a thick smog of jittering torment, almost feeling the poison sink into his guts like a hypermobile cancer--and seen Goku's forehead, unburdened by the diadem.

Now, he knew a terror unlike anything he'd ever known before:

Gojyo driving Jeepu.

Uphill.

Though a forest.

At night.

With the speedometer throbbing somewhere just around 80 mph.

"SLOW DOWN, YOU GODDAMN MANIAC!" the blonde cried out. His sandal-encased food stomped down instinctively on the floor, trying to stamp on a brake that wasn't there. His ears were nearly shot out when Goku decided to contribute to the situation--by ripping up the air with that screeching noise he referred to as giggling.

"Relax, Sanzo-sama!" The redhead's voice was as smooth and slow as it always was, which did not comfort Sanzo in the slightest. Gojyo might not be very excited about seeing the next sunrise, but living to see such an event had suddenly bounded to the very top of Sanzo's internal list of Things To Do. "We'll find another place in no time at this rate!"

"Not if you turn us into street-pizza first, you cock-thirsty dog-raping shit-fondling--"

"Aww, I love you, too!"

"Go faster!" Goku insisted.

"NO!" But, of course, it was too late. Gojyo (who had apparently filled his boots with lead before getting behind the wheel of Jeepu) gunned the dragon-car. The speedometer crept up towards ninety. Trees appeared to leap out at the ikkou momentarily, like oncoming ghosts. Jeepu, who seemed to actually enjoy being able to cut loose, chirped happily. The little traitor.

It occurred to Sanzo that it might not take marauding youkai, his own hands, Gyuu-mao, smoking, Goku losing his diadem, or the smell of Gojyo's dirty socks to kill him. His heart was going to burst apart in his chest instead. And he would come back, as the nastiest evil spirit the gods would concoct, in order to eat the idiot _boki_ kappa alive.

The village, as it happened, was attained not a few minutes later, with surprising suddenness. Goku was the first to spot the scant street-lights through the foliage (Sanzo being too obsessed with thinking about murdering Gojyo to properly see). Given how fast the idiot hanyo was driving, it was a blue-eyed miracle that they didn't simply blast through the little town, unable to stop their own inertia. Instead, he slammed on the brakes as they hit the town limits, bringing Jeepu to a miserable, screaming stop. Sanzo, who had never buckled a seat-belt in his life, flew forward and soundly smacked his nose against the windshield.

"Here!" Gojyo said, in that sing-song voice he reserved for annoying the monk.

"Thank the gods," Sanzo snapped, in the only prayer that he'd ever mean sincerely. "You're a fucking menace. How the hell did I let you talk me into permitting you to drive?"

"I'm the only one other than Hakkai who knows how, remember?"

"... shut the hole in your face."

The monk gladly slid out of the car into a boneless pile on the earth. His heart was still racing far too fast for him to consider walking just yet. He shakily stood, waiting to see if it would explode like a meat grenade or slow down.

"How's the idiot patient?" he heard Gojyo say, as the kappa stepped out of Jeepu and slammed the door.

"Hakkai? Asleep, somehow." Goku shifted; the youkai uttered a quiet, pained moan. "Mostly. He's been in and out all day."

"Well, we should all just be grateful that it's only taken us this long to get to blessed civilization," Sanzo said. His heart was apparently deciding to relax. "I can only take one full day of Gojyo behind the wheel. I think I might actually die of a heart attack if we had to endure another."

"Damn it, I _knew_ I should have gone faster," the redhead grumbled.

Before the blonde could properly discipline Gojyo--and the kappa's torment would only begin with the paper fan, oh yes--a quiet, musical voice interrupted their quarrel. "Pardon me... are you gentlemen all well?"

Sanzo turned to face the speaker, his hand drifting towards his gun-holster. "Who the hell's asking?"

The speaker appeared to have wandered out of one of the nearby cottages (as had most of the village's citizens, who were curious about who was railing and screeching in the night). Sanzo's vision registered short, smooth black hair, and eyes that appeared to be silver in the moonlight. The man was staring at them each in turn, a quizzical expression on his face, as if he'd never seen people before.

That icy silver gaze lingered on Sanzo. The monk inwardly cursed. He knew that this guy was looking at his sutra, peering at the chakra that his bangs never quite covered up, and registering who he was. He waited for the usual avalanche of praise, prostration, and adulation.

Instead, he got: "They call me Jiro, sirs. Is that man wounded?"

Sanzo glanced over his shoulder. Goku had his skinny arms looped around Hakkai's shoulders, and was trying to lift the other man up. Gojyo stood nearby, watching, lighting up a cigarette. He seemed in no hurry to help Goku out. All the haphazard bandages--Gojyo's bandana, Hakkai's headband and layman's sash--were crusted with black, dried blood. At least the converted youkai's guts hadn't started hanging out again. "Yeah, but it's his own damned fault."

"May I look him over? I have a talent with medicines." He looked over the three conscious members of the ikkou. "And you all seem like you could use a bit of hospitality."

The blonde looked at Jiro warily. "I'm not preachin'."

"Sir, I would not ask such a thing of a guest." Jiro even sounded a little bit horrified at the idea. "Your business, and your words, are your own."

"What do you think of that, Sanzo-sama?" Gojyo, and the monk briefly entertained a fantasy of knocking the redhead's teeth right out of his fat, stupid mouth.

Instead, the blonde favored Jiro with that rarest of gifts: a small, unassuming, quiet smile.

-----

The sick view time differently than do the well. Those who are hale and hearty see time as passing in a linear fashion. While it might appear to move more quickly or more slowly at times, it still is marching ever on, towards the only thing that anyone can know for certain about their lives: a death.

When one falls ill, or is badly injured, time does not pass in the same fashion. Oh, they're assured that it moves forward still, but to them, it holds fast. It skips backwards and leaps forwards in unintelligible spasms, like a holy roller. Some moments last for years; some weeks will pass like a single hour. All is hazed over with fever, infection and pain, and with the deep, nasty, visceral itch of the body pulling itself back into one solid piece.

Cho Hakkai did not really remember much of what happened to him over the next week or so. Later, he was told of Gojyo's attempt to drive, and Sanzo's near-heart-attack. He was told that this took only a day's worth of driving, but to him, it had lasted a small eternity--the heavy burn of Gojyo and Sanzo endlessly smoking (more so than usual, both of them), the murmur of Gojyo and Goku arguing without daring to actually fight. The bright glint of the sun reflecting blindingly off the mirror-like desert. The desert fading into night and into a forest. Goku dampening his face with a wet rag, asking him if he was being jostled too much by the kappa's bad driving, if he hurt too badly. He did, and horribly, but somehow he always managed to smile in response.

The next six days in town felt like a few minutes, to him. He slept deeply the entire time, and did not remember much. He recalled waking to hear the rest of the party talking to a doctor. The doctor laughingly told them that the wound was healing marvelously, and that he could expect to be up and about weeks before any other person on Earth had any right to be standing.

And once, he woke to the feel of incredible, celestial cool sinking into the painfully-dry skin of his face. His eyes had fluttered open, and he'd momentarily glimpsed Gojyo--his eyes dark, a thoughtful expression seeming strange on his playful face. The hanyo had a broken and squeezed aloe leaf resting on his knee, and was massaging the gelatinous insides into Hakkai's sunburned face and wind-chapped lips. He had rested calloused fingertips against Hakkai's eyelids, making them close, and the converted youkai remembered nothing else.

After nearly a week's worth of sleep, Hakkai finally awakened to a world that was not tainted with needling pain, nor with maddening itch. He shifted in his bed. Surprisingly soft futon, laid out smoothly on a bare pine-wood floor that still smelled of sap. His blankets were soft and welcoming. The bandages that had looped crazily around his torso had, somewhere along the way, been replaced with a long, clean square of white cloth that was taped in place. The cloth was speckled darkly with herbs that, he presumed, were for healing.

Perhaps that had been a monk, then, and not a doctor.

He rested his head back. Strands of his own mahogany hair interrupted his view of a clean, impeccable ceiling. The pillow felt like a small sack of heaven. Sadly, he was no longer tired. He could feel that his stomach was sealed again, toughened up. The new scar tissue would probably be indistinguishable from the old, but he would still carry the reminder of yet another mind-raping experience with him for the rest of his life.

Silently focusing, his forest-green eyes slipping shut, Hakkai reached out, his chi swelling and stretching--trying to locate the others. At the least, he could ease his mind about where they were. Sanzo was off, somewhere else in the building (heliotrope, pride, anger, vain love, a fierce, self-spurning mourning). Gojyo (magenta, virility, passivity, avarice, determined depression) and Goku (orange-aurum, innocence, possessiveness, loneliness, desperate need) were both not far from him--outside his room. Nearer still was someone he did not know, a chi that made him think of the taste of lemon and the smells of summer, and the cool holiness of a closed library.

One of the boards, ill-set into the floor, creaked beneath the weight of a wooden sandal.

Hakkai glanced towards the noise, and the unfamiliar wraith of chi. It belonged to no one he'd ever seen before, a nondescript male, possessed of the darkest hair and the brightest silver eyes that Hakkai had ever seen. He was leaning on the wall, beside the paper door (painted with calligraphy so loose and sprawling that he could not hope to read it). Beside him was a large and intricate painting of Kanzeon Bosatsu; each of hir thousand arms seemed to be present. He smiled gently.

"Hakkai awakes," he said. "I'm glad to see you well. I was beginning to wonder if you'd ever stir again."

The converted youkai sank back a little into the futon. His body tensed defensively. He did not like it much when someone he did not know used his name. If the man had called him Gonou, Hakkai supposed that he would have pounded him with chi-cannons until he was nothing but a greasy smear on the painted paper door. "I don't believe I know you."

"Not yet," the man admitted, stepping away from the door and kneeling down beside the futon. "I'm called Jiro, and except for my current guests, there's nothing extraordinary about me. Your friends called you Hakkai, and since the blonde man could be no one but the Genjo Sanzo-sama, I would hazard a guess that you are one of his youkai companions."

There was none of the usual spiteful judgment attached to that word, _youkai_. Hakkai stared up at his host in mild surprise. "And you have helped us anyhow."

"Of course. You've been chosen by the Sanzo and by the gods, and even if you had not, it wouldn't be my place to judge you by your birthright."

Hakkai felt no urge to correct Jiro's perceptions on how he had been unwillfully made into a youkai--those were waters too murky for someone he'd only just met. He watched, his chi balling up instinctively, as the man reached down and lightly probed the cloth bandage with his fingertips. "You've healed remarkably well," Jiro said, his words colored with admiration. "Even for a youkai. I would say that you could be up and about this evening, if you're careful. Your companions will be relieved."

Companions. Oh, God. Hakkai had reached out for them all instinctively, knowing that they were the only three in Shangri-La who could possibly have cared enough about his well-being to have rescued him--but, now that he dwelled on it, he had no idea why such a thing would have happened. He'd left them all, had he not? He'd burned Sanzo pretty badly by calling the monk out on his hypocrisy, and Goku had to be hurt for being completely ignored... and there was Gojyo. He had no idea how he'd even _begin_ to apologize to the hanyo, or any of them. His mind had been consumed with the ideal of killing Amaya quickly and spiriting back to do just that--so much so that he'd not even thought of the fact that they might not accept his regret. He really didn't get why they'd come after him--or how they'd known--or anything after Amaya gutted him, but the odds of his having already explained his actions were nil.

What little he did remember, involved Gojyo screaming about what a huge pain in his ass Hakkai was. That wasn't encouraging.

He stared up dumbly at Jiro, waiting for the questions that the silver-eyed man had to have--how Hakkai'd gotten so grievously injured, perhaps, or where the old scar tissue had come from, or why his eyes had widened with shame and surprise at his last words. Instead, Jiro stood up, his knees popping, and walked over to the paper-curtain door. He accordioned it aside and stepped out of the room, saying, as he left, "He's awake now."

After Jiro disappeared, the hanyo stepped in through the doorway. Dark red hair, pulled into a loose ponytail, reflected ember highlights in the light of the room's lanterns. His characteristic cigarette was absent. His scars, normally masked by his carefully-arranged and styled hair, lay naked against his cheek.

Hakkai's healing-green eyes met cool, empty crimson orbs, and he knew that he was still in a hell of a lot of trouble. He licked over his lips. He thought he tasted the bitter flavor of aloe, lingering there. "Gojyo," he said, his voice sounding more or less intact. "I am... I--"

But before he could finish whatever half-formed thought he'd begun to articulate, Goku followed after, stepping into his sick-room. The heretic's face was uncharacteristically serious. His large gold eyes were set firmly and narrowly in his rounded face; his mouth was a short, serious line. He did not appear to be very impressed with the fact that Hakkai was still alive. His arms were behind his back, like he was hiding something behind his thin body.

The half-youkai and the living blasphemy mutely stared.

"I--listen to me, I--" For some reason, their serious silence was more unnerving than any verbal assault they might have launched.

"You ready?" Goku said, looking over at his partner in crime.

"Abso-fucking-lutely," Gojyo replied. His grin was crooked, charming. It made him strangely beautiful.

Goku tossed Gojyo one of the things that he'd been hiding behind his back--a small, tasseled pillow. They looked Hakkai over; he stared back. His confused glance could not have been more picture-perfect, had Goku and Gojyo both actually turned into a saru and a kappa. "Wh--"

"DOGPILE HAKKAI!"

The world flew into a mish-mash of sharp elbows, heavy bodies, Goku's giggling, Gojyo's declarations of victory, and flying, thwacking pillows.

-----

The brunette was pronounced fully cured by Jiro the following morning, both of being gutted and of being pounded into pudding by his friends. The silver-eyed man had the silence and patience of a stone. He never asked where they were going, or why Hakkai had been wounded, or whether or not Sanzo might share a homily with him before they went. Perhaps because of Jiro's discretion, Hakkai found himself thinking that they had to come back here, if they lived through putting down Gyuu-mao.

The end of that morning saw Jiro waving them off on their journey. He was grinning broadly that morning. Gojyo muttered that the poor bastard must be glad to have his house to himself again--after all, he had no way of knowing that Sanzo had privately pulled Jiro aside, and referred to him as the best Buddhist the monk had ever met.

After their long rest, the Sanzo-ikkou moved forward, as it always did. Gojyo and Goku fought; Sanzo interjected his own poison commentary; Hakkai drove and laughed. All of them kept their eyes everywhere, looking out for a possible youkai attack, Kou Gaiji's meddling, or Hazel's shrieking obsession. It took several days to reach another village.

When they arrived at the new village and its hotel, they found themselves--as they often did--in possession of only two rooms. Sanzo started to declare that he wasn't going to share quarters with the monkey or the kappa, on the grounds that he'd had enough of animals for the time being, but his words were unnecessary.

"C'mon, saru," Gojyo said first. Something sharp lurked in the languid smoothness of his voice, like a dagger in a smoke-filled room. "You still owe me a hundred yen from the last time we played poker. Wanna try to win it back?"

A weird, unsettled feeling passed through the group at his words. Hakkai found some fascinating dust motes on the floor to examine. Goku started to open his mouth to protest, thought better of it, and clapped his trap shut again. Sanzo--unused to having his ire-filled tirades interrupted by unconditional surrender--cleared his throat, coughed, and finally held one of the keys out to the redhead.

"Keep it down," was all he managed to say before their hotel room door shut.

Once in their room--which was probably originally meant to be a broom-closet--Sanzo immediately picked the larger of the two beds. He sat down, kicking off his wooden sandals and dropping off his robes and the sutra. Everything clattered and whispered to the hardwood floor. He laid back, his long, denim-clad legs stretching out to the end of the bed, his socked feet pressing against the foot-board. He dug out his well-loved pack of cigarettes, and lit himself a coffin-nail.

That was the way. Relax. Relax, and not think about his idiot companions. Only Kanzeon Bosatsu (and he suspected that the Jade Emperor had probably spiked hir baby-food with fugu) would find it funny to pair him with such louts. Louts whose activities and personal lives did not matter to him. He already had to live and travel with the bastards, show them where to squat and where to sleep, and he would be damned to an eternity of being in a very small room with Kannon before he would become a fucking _psychologist_. What they did was none of his business, and his was none of theirs, and that was how he liked it.

The monk only had the loosest of understandings about everything that must have happened behind the scenes, when he'd gotten unspeakably drunk a couple of weeks ago. He knew that Hakkai and Gojyo had gone into that hotel room together, and that come morning, Gojyo was sleeping off a hangover underneath Goku's bed, while Hakkai was with the woman he'd identified later as Amaya. Everything else had been supposition. Supposition that had proved correct.

No, he was NOT doing this. He was having a smoke and thinking of nothing. He was not going to spend his precious brain-time on ruminating about why Hakkai and Gojyo weren't rooming together, god damn it.

Violet eyes trained on Hakkai, as if the youkai were a target. The other man was walking out of the water-closet, having changed into his loose, pale-blue pajamas. His clothing, folded neatly enough to please the strictest of generals, was cradled in his arms. He moved to the other bed softly, his feet not seeming to touch the worn floorboards. His monocle (the lens swept with soft scratches from the sand that had rubbed into it, before Goku had had the unusual foresight to think to look for the thing after Amaya's death) reflected light and turned into a small moon. His other eye had disappeared behind a sheaf of chestnut-brown hair.

His smile was strong, pleased, and unutterably fake.

Sanzo said nothing. He rolled over onto his side, giving Hakkai a good view of his thinly-muscled back. Good. Out of sight and out of mind.

The other bed creaked softly in protest as the converted youkai laid down. A soft 'click'--him taking off his monocle and setting it on the night-stand--echoed through the silent room. A soft puff of air blew out the lantern.

Silence. Normally, Sanzo was grateful for how unearthly quiet Hakkai tended to be. After a long ride with the cockroach and the saru, it was soothing to not have to scream anything, or even say anything. They went about their nightly routines in silent peace, and that silence would remain unbroken and silver throughout the entire night. It let him clear his head, think through whatever it was that was weighing on his mind that evening.

It wasn't like bunking with Goku. Goku snored and thrashed in his sleep like a drowning man; he talked and burbled and drooled all over his pillows. Now, though, he found himself wishing that the scrawny, gangly monkey was flailing in the other bed. Or asking him a bunch of stupid questions. That always drove him straight up the fucking wall, but it would have been preferable to this embittered, mind-blowing, frustrating _quiet_.

He put out his cigarette on the wall, leaving behind a small finger of charcoal. "Get out of here, will you?"

"I'm sorry?" Murderously polite.

"I could have told you that whatever the fuck you're doing is a mistake," Sanzo said, his voice as quiet and deadly as the blade of an assassin. "He's a stupid redneck ass-hat."

Hakkai did not respond. Sanzo fancied that the youkai was completely bewildered. The blonde had, not a fortnight before, threatened Hakkai's life if he were ever met with solid evidence of whatever was going on with the two of them, and here he was, talking it over--lecturing him, for fuck's sake. He rationalized his actions by telling himself that, rather than being concerned over the welfare of Hakkai's emotional state, he was merely pissed off about the fact that his subordinates' spat was making his life harder.

"The Buddha," he said, his voice taking on the expansive tones of a teacher calling out a rogue student, "did not get very much right. Which is why the phrase revolving around killing him is so popular. But there were a few good points he made. 'If a man loves fifty people, he has fifty pains, and if he loves no one, he is free of agony.'"

Hakkai shifted in his bed. "'In the ignorance of the whole truth, each person maintains his own arrogant point of view.'"

... was Hakkai actually trying to get into a theological debate with him? Sanzo had been spoon-fed this tripe since before he could talk. "' Sensuous craving often gives rise to dissension, quarrelling and fighting.'"

"'Of all the worldly passions, lust is the most intense. Make proper use of it,'" Hakkai quoted right back, and Sanzo could swear that he could HEAR the motherfucker smile. "Also, 'One should refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs.'"

"Eh, what the fuck did Buddha know," Sanzo griped. He should have known better than to try to take Hakkai on in direct verbal debate. It was like taking on a shikigami, wearing nothing but a smile and wielding nothing but a wet noodle.

"If you had a point, Sanzo, I'm afraid that I've missed it. Perhaps you could enlighten me?"

"Stop being such a white-livered skeeze. I'm getting sick of breathing your air. Go crash in the other room."

"The quarters are cramped enough as they stand. Three in one room is rather difficult--"

"Then I guess you'll be sending good old Monkey Brains over here, won't you?"

"Do you miss him that badly?"

"Get out of my room, you shitstain."

-----

Flush.

Goku looked over his cards. Yes, he'd actually managed to collect a real flush this time. Each card (two, three, five, ten, jack) was pockmarked with diamonds. Oh, he had Gojyo this time. The cockroach had somehow been pulling incredibly complicated hands this entire game, as if he were pulling the damn cards he needed from thin air. It was really hard to beat a flush, though, he knew enough to know that.

He looked over the hanyo. Gojyo was in his element, and at peace with the world. His cards were casually fanned out against his dark, long fingers, and his smile was even and unreadable. Most of his hair was pulled back into a floppy ponytail, except for the hanks of bloody silk in the front that curtained across his cheeks, obscuring his mother's eternal contribution to his countenance. A cigarette was crooked between his lips.

"You ready to get this over with, monkey?" he said. His words were slightly blurred by his lips, which remained clamped around his shitty-smelling smoke.

"Damn right! You ready to lose, shovel-head?"

Goku triumphantly dropped his cards to the table, next to the small pile of toothpicks that they had been using to represent yen. "Read 'em and weep, Red-haired Ann!"

The hanyo gave him a threat-filled glare at the stupid nickname, then laid his own hand down easily on the tabletop, as smooth as the skin of a peach. A series of hearts smiled up from the polished wooden surface: four, five, six, seven, eight.

"Oopsie! Looks like a straight flush to beat out your shit-flush!" Gojyo reached out and swept over more of Goku's toothpicks. His side of the table was beginning to look like a vicious battle had been fought between two splinter armies.

"God damn it, Gojyo, when I catch you cheating--"

The door handle began to turn.

Both Goku and Gojyo gave wary glances to that door. There had been many different occasions where marauding youkai (or citizens outraged at their imposters' tomfoolery) had simply walked through the front door. Mentally, Goku reached out for his nyou-ibo--not daring to draw it until he saw an enemy, but not daring to not have it halfway in hand if there was one there.

Gojyo glanced down at the pile of toothpicks, and began to count them.

The door pushed open, and the heretic relaxed--it was only Hakkai. The false youkai was wearing his pajamas, and carrying his clothes. He gave them both a large, surprisingly awkward smile.

"His Eminence," he said with no discernable sarcasm, "has determined that I am not worthy company for the evening."

"Huh?"

"Sanzo's not satisfied with our sleeping arrangements. He wants you over there immediately."

Goku looked over at the redhead. Gojyo still had not looked up at the room's new occupant. Dark, blunted fingertips rolled the toothpicks aside, from the pooled pile to the pile of ones he'd already counted. His cigarette bobbed amiably as his lips unconsciously moved, silently naming the numbers. Its cherry winked and flared momentarily.

All right, fine. If Gojyo wanted to be stupid and stubborn, that was his deal.

The saru stood up, giving a sharp little shrug (it had to be sharp, his shoulders were as bony as small mountains). "He's not on a drunk, is he?"

Hakkai's eyes curved into his smile. "Not that I am aware of."

"Good, 'cuz beer makes him fart," he announced, his voice as innocent and matter-of-fact as a child disclosing embarrassing family information to a friend.

Gojyo made a choked, snorting noise that sounded like squelched laughter.

-----

With Goku gone, there was nothing to distract, and nothing to say.

The lamp went out. The room seemed only half-formed, between shadow and light, from the fuzzy moon-beams that drifted through the curtained window. Hakkai did not have to look up from the bed to know that Gojyo was still sitting at the table--all he needed to know was the ochre burn of cigarette smoke still fresh in the air, the soft click of toothpicks still being pushed over the table-surface, and the near-silent sound of the hanyo pretending to count out his fake winnings.

Instead, he stared towards the ceiling. In the darkness, his right eye--the one he'd nearly gouged out all those years ago, and had only been stopped by Goku's undefeated determination--perceived the world slightly different than his whole one. It thought it saw things, writhing and reddish, in the corners of its vision. When he'd first begun to see out of that eye again, he'd believed that he was seeing the souls of his victims, trying to peel back reality just far enough to grab onto him and drag him into Hell. Now he knew better, of course. There were no souls there--he didn't know what souls were meant to look like, anyhow, but these were not it.

They were vines. Creeping crimson kudzu that netted over his vision. If he stared long enough, the right half of his vision would eventually be overwhelmed with a geometric grid of impossibly red leaves and vines, which was why he was always certain to shut his eyes when the lights went out--unless he was distracted enough, with other things.

He'd wanted to shield Gojyo from that--from the part of his brain that craved the feeling of red vines whipping across his skin, from the loss of mind and the joyful cruelty, from the rage. There were many bladed edges to Hakkai's soul, and they did not care who they cut, so long as the cutting was had and the blood was warm and the pain was rich. But that wasn't what mattered, anymore, was it?

"I am such a bastard."

He thought he heard Gojyo smile. "Never would have guessed."

"No," the converted youkai said, as if Gojyo had contradicted him. "I try to care for people, but I do it at their own--"

"Shut up."

Now, Hakkai did glance over at the room's other occupant. Gojyo had treated him in many different fashions, over their colored and tangled past--like a beloved and ancient teacher, or a delicate lace tapestry, or the other half of Gojyo's own mental conversations, or (in recent times) like a drunk, horny, and barely-legal bar-girl. Rarely had the redhead ever addressed him as if Hakkai were a disrespectful, snotty brat in short-pants and oversized glasses.

The only light in the room--the ember glowing at the tip of the hanyo's cigarette--illuminated the lower edges of his face, bringing it out in relief against the darkness. It was resting against the side of his mouth, and as it bounced with his words, its light swelled and retreated against the scars on his face. "You believed that I've never seen the worst of you, and that I needed not to see it. Ditto the blondie and the monkey. I mean, you probably had other shit going behind it, but that was the real deal. So you shoved us off. Right?"

This wasn't going how Hakkai had been planning it to go. Granted, he'd actually not had a plan that he was aware of, but all the same... "Something like that, yes."

"And you figured that you could come back when it was all over and flash those baby green eyes and grin and make it all be sake and roses again, right?"

"I didn't--"

"Because," as if he'd not heard Hakkai interrupt him at all, "you act like the world's nicest guy, but in reality, you are _shit_ when it comes to figuring people out."

"I." There was not much sense in arguing. Gojyo hadn't gotten it quite right, but it was close enough for the labor of monks, as Sanzo was wont to say. "Yes."

"You forgot about when we all met you, man. You forgot that we all know everything. I doubt Goku understands the finer details, but he knows that a thousand is a lot of youkai for one man to kill. Whether you like it or not, we know how fucking horrible you can be."

"... yes."

"Just like you know what Mother was like, or Jien--or Dokugaku-whatever. And you know enough about what happened with Sanzo's master, probably more than me or Goku, and you know how long Goku was in that rock, and how miserable he was. You don't know all of it, but you know enough. And you live with us, and you know how we're all murderers and sinners."

He had nothing to say.

"And whether any one of us admits it or not, we all love you anyhow." At any other time, Gojyo would have laughed at the idea of Sanzo being able to love, and Hakkai with him. Now, neither said a word about it. "And you're stuck with me. I don't get attached easy, and once I do, whoever I'm attached to is doomed with me until they either kill me or die of bad hanyo luck. If you _ever_ fucking question that again, I will chop you up, cook you with an orange glaze, and tell Goku that you are chicken. Are we clear?"

It was not until the silence had hanged until it strangled that Hakkai realized a response was expected of him. Hearing that normally-laid-back voice sounding so terse and spent, like a rope that has been stretched until it begins to fray and groan, was a new and unsettling experience. And if how he said it was unsettling, then what he said was...

A relief.

In the blurry vision of his right eye, he thought he saw the twisting vines settle back into their corners. His Gonou side was always there, and so was the youkai, and one day, both might well gnaw through their restraints. And that, he thought, was all right. Gojyo had started to hit upon the path that Hakkai's own thoughts had marched through--that whatever else, they all had to forgive each other everything. Because no one else in the heavens, the hells, or the middle kingdoms would ever be able to.

"Crystal."

"So you're done being a know-it-all cock-smith?"

He resisted the urge to laugh. "I suppose that one could call it that, yes."

"Yeah, well." Gojyo finished counting through his toothpick horde, and brushed them all away. His cigarette was shortly going to be nothing but an ignited filter. "You owe me, you little emo bitch."

"Sanzo, is that you?"

"Oh, hush." The hanyo stamped out his cigarette on the tabletop, and fumbled for another.

Hakkai listened as the flint in the redhead's Zippo gave birth to a small flame. Forgiven or no, he still felt like he was in the doghouse, as the saying went. Not that he could blame Gojyo. Normally, his best friend was almost frightfully adept at forgetting those who'd wronged him (a natural enough defense mechanism, considering)--but then, Hakkai had never really wronged him before. There had to be _some_thing he could do, some show he could make, that he was serious about staying--that he'd never wanted to leave...

"Gojyo?"

"Aa?" He could sense the hanyo turning his blood-colored gaze to view his prostrate form, curled slightly beneath the sheets. Hakkai sat up, the moonlight limning his pale skin with a near-metallic cast.

He smiled.

"Could I get you to put out that cigarette?"

_-end-_


End file.
